A badly beaten up iPod video (30 GB) came into my possession (Quite a while ago, actually). (It can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/anticitizen/1488499268/)
Among the various problems, it has a badly damaged front cover (What you see is the iPod after some very intimate time with a can of brasso), and the battery was kicking the bucket. Searching the serial number said it had been purchased January 2006.
So I got about $50 together and set to work restoring this iPod to it’s former glory. The battery arrived last week (It’s a NewerTech), and it’s been installed. This thing now gets longer runtime than my iPod Photo (Who could go for 16 hours!). Of course, this is with the brightness turned all the way down. I never use it for movies, so I keep it as low as possible.
And now, I ordered a front cover for it (White, since white doesn’t seem to scratch as easily as black does) from iFixit.com, which arrived last week. I installed that part, and unfortunately, it was a little bit of a letdown. The front cover doesn’t scratch as easily as the black one did, but it still scratched quite a bit. Thankfully, the white cover hides the damage better than the black. If you turn the brightness all the way up (or even midway), you will see the blemishes in the screen.
For $50, I got a product that will last me for at least another two years, a fraction of the cost of replacing it with an iPod Classic/Touch/Nano.
…However, I went to Costco today to look around, primarily to eat lunch (You could walk the store and eat lunch for free. Just partake of all the samples), and saw the big iTouch/iPod display, and lo and behold, they had two Nanos and a touch sitting there. I tried powering up the touch, but it balked that it needed to be charged. Still, I was quite sucked in by the device. It was small, and even though it was a store display, it didn’t look damaged at all.
+1 for durability.
While I could run down to Apple Store Walnut Creek and get a display model that actually powers up and lets me mess with it, I don’t want to go to Walnut Creek because I have no license, and as such, no way there. And parking’s a bitch.
However, I think I’ve made up my mind, and starting Nov. 2007, I am going to be an owner of an 8GB iPod Touch. While many may complain that 8GB is too small, it isn’t for me. My library is only 5 GB at most. 3 GB if I prune out the stuff I never listen to but just have on my computer for archiving purposes. And videos? Those have yet to break the 1 GB mark, let alone 512 MB mark. So a8 GB touch it will be.
