a little ludwig goes a long way: iPod photo first impressions — not greatJohn Ludwig has a post out today on his first impressions of the iPod photo. And while he mostly groans about it basically not working operationally as it should, I think there is a bigger point here. Who the heck wants to carry around tiny little pictures on a tiny little screen with them? You can’t see any of the detail. You can’t blow them up. I can just see it now at Christmas, you and Grandma and Grandpa sitting around the iPod with Uncle Charlie all squinting trying to look at a tiny picture on a little screen.
Don’t get me wrong, the photo iPod has great brand name and thus will sell and will be a novelty and kind of a cool thing at first, but it will wear off after people get bored of seeing tiny little pictures on tiny little screens. It’s a fad, a trend.
I can kind of see the point that maybe you could use it to transport photos from your house to grandma’s house to put them on her hard drive, but any old external hard drive does this trick and more. And it’s not so easy getting things on and off iPods from my experience and what I’ve heard from others.
As for me, I love the idea of portability of pictures but I just put them all on my laptop which goes with me everywhere. The pictures are much larger and I have full photo editing tools via photoshop there at my disposal. Oh yeah and it also plays music and can hold more pictures and music than an iPod. Oh yeah and I can check my email with it, post to my blog with it, read my RSS feeds with it. Oh and I can watch dvd’s on it, rip grandma’s CDs (wink, wink) while I’m at her house, watch video that I’ve transfered from a Media Center PC back at my house and more.
As for sitting around a couch squinting at little pictures on a photo iPod. No thanks.
Seems to me that today’s ultimate media convergence device is the laptop, not the photo iPod. Now if only I could put the thing up to the side of my face and make a phone call with it.