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Over
the past 10 months, the iPod has seamlessly permeated my life.
My music collection is far more organised now; I listen to a lot
more of it, while driving, flying, working, waiting... any time
and anywhere. At the core lies the near-magical ability to carry
600 albums in my pocket, sliced and sorted by genres, artists,
albums or songs, at my whim. And around that core is an ever-growing
range of accessories, software and hardware to enable me to crank
up my little white, smaller-than-a-cigarette-pack gizmo, any which
way I want. In the car to work, the iPod mates with the iTrip
to broadcast its hard disk full of songs directly to the car's
sound system; in an aircraft, noise-cancelling in-ear phones (specially
designed for the pod) block the ambient noise and deliver pure
music; at home the iPod quickly connects, wirelessly or otherwise,
to my stereo system, eliminating the need to search for CDs or
tracks that I want to play. And I can even create my own playlists
on the fly, at the click of a button and light flicks of my thumb
on its touch-sensitive wheel.
Here I am blabbering about the iPod when
the matter at hand is actually the Sony Network Walkman HD3 (yes,
a mouthful, I know!), which wants to take the iPod head-on. Besides
its size (it's even smaller than the iPod), the hd3 counts among
its selling points, a higher battery life. If the iPod is nifty,
the hd3 is niftier. Its 20-gigabyte hard disk holds (so says Sony)
13,000 songs of an average four minutes each, provided you store
each of them in Sony's proprietarily owned atrac3plus compression
format. In comparison, the iPod 20 GB model claims to store just
5,000 songs. In addition, the hd3 claims a battery life of 30
hours, whereas the iPod's is a mere 12 hours.
So, should I dump the pod and go for the
Network Walkman? Probably not. In the world of portable mp3 players,
the gadget you carry your music in is just one small part of the
story. The bigger part is how you get your music onto it. That's
where software comes in. In the iPod's case, the software is the
incredibly user-friendly (it's from Apple after all!) iTunes,
which also dovetails into Apple's iTunes Music Store where you
can choose to download songs from a range of more than a million
at $0.99 (Rs 43.56) a pop, although that service is yet to be
introduced in India. Transferring songs from a pc to the iPod
is a piece of cake: you can either do it automatically or simply
by dragging your song or album and dropping it on your connected
iPod's screen icon.
And its challenger? In comparison, Sony's
Sonic Stage software is awkward and primitive. You can't drag
and drop songs on a connected hd3 and while you can make compilation
albums from all the songs you have, I couldn't figure out an easy
way of making playlists.
So what's the verdict? For me, it's simple.
The iPod wins. Better software, classier looks and an array of
accessories outweighs the hd3's size, battery life and storage
capacity. Now for the rub: the Network Walkman hd3 retails at
Rs 26,990; the iPod for Rs 22,100. Still undecided?
-SN
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