Smart Buying
In the iPod Zone
Your guide to the core features of Apple's hottest player.
By Sean O'Neill
From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, January 2006
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The lowdown
iPod: Perfect for power players
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Features: The top-of-the-line iPod includes a 2.5-inch color screen that can display videos, photos and album-cover art. Besides music, it plays recordings of many videos and some top TV shows sold at iTunes.com for $2 each. It connects to TVs and projectors, if you buy a cable for $19 from Apple.com. Capacity: You can store about 360 hours of music, or about 75 hours of video, on iPods with a 30-gigabyte hard drive and about twice as much on 60-GB models. The 30-GB version lets you watch up to two hours of video, and hear up to 14 hours of music, on one battery charge.  Price: $300 for the 30-GB model, $400 for the 60-GB model. | |
iPod nano: Made for marathon music sessions
Features: About the size of a business card and 1/4-inch thick, the nano has a color screen that's 1.5 inches on the diagonal. It's nearly half the weight and half the depth of the iPod mini, which it has replaced. You can listen to songs for up to 14 hours on one charge. The nano stores its songs on flash memory, so it has no moving parts. That means songs won't skip when the device is shaken, which is not the case for hard-drive iPods.
Capacity: You can store about 24 hours of music on a 2-GB flash-drive nano and twice as much on the 4-GB flash-drive version. Both can store photos taken by your digital camera (but not video).
Price: $200 for the 2-GB model, $250 for the 4-GB model.
iPod shuffle: Tiny tunes for teens
Features: The shuffle is the cheapest and least powerful of Apple's players. The size of a pack of gum, the white device is exponentially better than a CD player to use while walking or exercising because of its slim profile, long battery life (up to 12 hours on a charge) and use of flash memory, which prevents song-skipping. The shuffle lacks a screen, and it connects to your computer with a USB cable, which means it wonմ work with accessories that use a dock connector.
Capacity: The 512-megabyte shuffle can store about six hours of music; the 1-GB version packs nearly twice as much.
Price: $100 for the 512-MB model, $130 for the 1-GB model.