HiFi Geek

ACCESSORIES FOR THE iPod

A wide variety of accessories have been launched for the bipods ex. the sound recorders, FM radio tuners, wired remote controls and the audio/video cables for TV connections, external speakers, wireless remote controls, protective cases/films, wireless earphones etc etc as the list is too tall. The manufacturers of these were the Griffin Technology, Belk in, JBL, Bose, Monster Cable, and Send Station.

REVISED MODELS OF THE iPod

The revised models of the iPods are given the term “generation”. Apple gives only the newest generations of each of the iPods. Each new generation is smaller, lighter and has some or the other new features than the previous one and has the same price than the older

Model, most of the time.

LEGAL ISSUES

In 2005, the company was filed two lawsuits for they had patent infringement by the iPod line and its associated technologies. One was from the Advance Audio Devices who claimed that iPod line breached its patent from a “music jukebox” while the other, IP Portfolio Company called Pat-rights claimed that Apple’s fairplay technology breached a patent of the Ho Keung Tse including the online music stores of Sony, Real Networks, Napster and Music match as defendants.

Next was that their application to the US Patent and Trademark was rejected for a patent on rotational user inputs.

Apple’s rival in the MP3 players, Creative Technology claimed that the company was holding a patent on part of the music selection used by the ipod line which the rivals had

dubbed as Zen Patent. Also another case was filed against Apple by this company that

Apple was breaching the US laws by importing iPods into US.

Its battery life is limited to 8 hours whereas their advertisement say that it reaches upto 14 hours. It was filed a case for shorter life of the battery and degradation over time which were settled when Apple offered free replacements. The iPods cannot be opened for changing the battery and hence, the people who complained were given new ones of the same rate.

They have even been criticized for the short life of their hard drives…

Also the screen of the first generation iPod Nano had become unusable as they can be stretched easily.

There were also allegations of over exploitation of the workers which came out to be true for many workers as they worked 60 hours a week for 35% of their time, more than six consecutive days of 25% of their time.

REVIEWS AND AWARDS

Apple ipods have won many awards for engineering excellence, innovative audio product, best computer product of 2006, respected entertainment device and good reviews for its looks, design and ease of usage. It is also being use as a business device by many international firms. And are used in education too, as Apple offers a collection of lesson plans, academic research in nursing education and K-16 education,

 
THE STORY BEHIND THE MAKING OF iPod

When the company of Apple began creating its software for the market of digital services, iPod came into existence from Apple’s digital hub category. When the company explored the market, they came to know that the market for the digital music players was quite big and clunky or small and useless with awful use interfaces.

This make the company takes a decision of creating the iPods. This product was developed in less than a year with a 5GB hard drive that could accommodate 1000 songs. It is true that Apple did not design the whole product them self and used Portable Player’s platform based on the 2ARM cores that had rudimentary software that ran on a commercial microkernel embedded OS. Portable Player had already been working on the Mp3 player with Bluetooth headphones with Apple contracting another company called Pixo that helped them to design and implement the user interface. Apple refined the look and feel of their software.

NAMING OF THE APPLE iPod

The name, iPod was created by a freelance copywriter called by Apple to figure out how to publicize the product, he , seeing the product thought of the song form a movie “Open the pod bay door, Hal!” which meant the white EVA pods of the discovery one spaceship. This was initially a trademark for a US patent but soon was assigned to Apple Computers.

FEATURES OF THE iPod

The iPod has many features including anti-aliased graphics and text, sliding animations, five buttons and the buttons integrated into a click wheel which perform the function of playing or changing to the next track, scrolling through the menu, controlling the volume etc.

It has also launched an iPod touch which uses a touch screen and no buttons.

All the iPods have the audio codecs except for the shuffle and 6G.

The sixth generation iPods use the Cirrus Logic audio codec chip.

The iPod Classic from the first to the sixth generation have 45.7mm hard drives from Toshiba.

iPod Mini has 25.4mm Micro drive by Hitachi and Seagate.

iPod Nano has a flash memory from Samsung, Toshiba and many others.

iPod touch and Nano too have a flash memory.

iPod Classic, first and second generation, Nano and Shuffle have an Internal Lithium

Polymer batteries whereas the iPod Classic, third to sixth generation use the Internal Lithium-ion Polymer batteries.

CONNECTIVITY OF iPods

The iPod comes with 2 wall chargers with its fireball and USB connectors that allow it to charge even without a computer. The fire wire connector was initially used to update the songs or to recharge the battery which could be done with the power adapter in the first four generations. A30 pin dock connector was introduced in the third generation iPods so

That they could be connected to many accessories from TV to speaker systems.

iTunes STORE

ITunes store is an online store run by the Apple Company and accessed through iTunes introduced on 29th April 2003. It has the facility to sell songs and only the iPods can play the content from the store. The videos have also been put on sale since 12 October 2005 and full length videos on 12 September 2006. However, the iPod cannot play songs from the competitors like the Microsoft WMA or Real networks’ Helix DRM. Apple even launched its Wi-Fi music store on the 5th of September 2007 which will allow you access the music store from an iPod touch or the iPhone and download songs directly that can be synced to the library of iTunes.

FILE TRANSFER IN iPod

All the IPods except iPod touch have the facility of storing the in disk mode. If the iPod is formatted on a Mac OS X then it will use the HFS+ file format whereas if it is formatted on Windows it will use the FAT32 format. In iPod, copying the audio or the video files to the drive with a file management application will not allow it to properly access them. You will have to use the software specially designed to transfer media files to iPods that are playable and viewable. The media files are stored in an iPod in a hidden folder with the database which can be accessed on the host system by enabling the hidden files to be shown. Audios can then be transferred by dragging or using the hardware.

ENHANCING OF THE SOUND

The bass distortion can be caused if the sound in an iPod is enhanced with its software equalizer (EQ) like the R&B, Rock, Acoustic and the bass booster. The EQ amplifies the audio level beyond the software limit that causes the distortion on songs having the bass drum even when the amplifier is low. Its hardware includes chipsets and electronics; microcontroller of iPod classic from the first to third generations, a 2ARM 7TDMI-derived CPUs that run at 90 MHz. The iPod Classic, iPod Mini, iPod Nano, all have a variable speed of 7TDMI CPUs that run at 80MHz. Then you have the iPod Nano that runs on Samsung System-On-Chip based on an ARM processor. Latest is the iPod Shuffle using SigmaTel STMP3550 chip.