keep up

I don't know about anyone else, but the ability to haul around photos on my iPod (to show to whom?) isn't worth the extra bucks. The color screen is nice, though.

Very handy if you have a digital camera and are going on a long holiday. When your CF card is full, download the images to the iPod

You can do that IF it can be a USB host or you have a laptop intermediary. I haven't seen much technical detail on the P-ipod yet, so maybe I'm wrong.

-Zeke

You're not wrong. Apple's decision not to have a flash memory port on the new iPod makes the product much weaker in my opinion. The colour screen and extended battery life are good, but not $100 good. Integrated TV-output is nice (for images) but is already also part of most every digital camera on the market. The iPod's advantage is being able to store more images than your camera's single flash card. But when you have to keep photos in-sync with a PC constantly, that's a bit of a hassle.

Like many others, I'd prefer to see images go onto the iPod from the camera, and THEN onto the computer. You can buy a one of two accessories from Belkin to do this, but they're very "Bulky" (pun intended) for what they do. There are some newer devices coming around that allow connection of a USB camera to a standard external USB hard drive. The small device acts as a master/host controlling the two slave/peripheral devices (as mass storage class connections I assume). So I suppose one of these will also work. But it's just another little dangly bit to lose or break. It would have been a killer blow (to so many other products) to put a CF and SD slot on the iPod.

The funny bit is that they're not hyping this product much. The new U2 special-edition iPod seems to have the lion's share of the limelight.

Bruno

You can get pictues onto your iPod using one of these

http://www.belkin.com/ipod/cameralink/

I take all my pictures in RAW format, so chances are they wouldn't show up on the fancy new iPod color screen anyway. For all the hassle, it's cheaper to purchase multiple CF cards than a "glorified storage container."

20 x 1Gb CF cards

I think I have to agree with all of you. The screen, while a nice thing to show a few photos to family when travelling, is not really that helpful for image review (too small), not useful for storage (no _easy_ way do directly dump photos), and certainly it won't display RAW files. With the cost of 1GB cards, I don't see how any mass offload device will be able to compete long term with just buying extra cards.

-Zeke

I've gotta add my vote to the less impressed.

I'm not crazy about my Archos AV340, but I do think that the AV400 series is incredible. The build quality is actually professional for once (a new direction for Archos products), and it has twice the functionality of the photo iPod. You can record and play videos, and transfer photos with the built-in CF reader. The AV480 is slightly bigger, twice as heavy, and $70 more, but it has 20GB more and almost twice the diagonal screen size in addition to the built in card reader.

Everyone swoons over the iPod, though, so they can get by on just the aura of their product and this thing will sell.

The real killer application of the album art would be if you could BROWSE by album cover. I don't think they've implemented that. I can do that on my Slimp3 web interface, and I LOVE it. It's like looking through your old CD case... which is one of the hands on things I really missed once going all non-media for my music. I never realized how much I picked an album just by art recognition. Also brings up one of the things i hate about iTunes: you have to store the album art on every song file. If you do artist->album organization like I do, this is super annoying and wastes a ton of space.

Not much to add, but I feel the same way as Loren does about album art... It's how I browse my albums on my computer.

I'm going on a 3.5 week holiday over Christmas and New Year to some pretty photogenic places - I'll need something like that then

The problem with the Belkin cameralink and their older CF adapter box is that it's slooooooow. Using the cameralink, they quote 750KBps for a PC formatted iPod or 650KBps for a Mac formatted iPod. The CF one was even slower. It averaged around 300KBps and most people complained about the 20+ minute waits for a 512MB card. It really ripped though the iPod battery as well.

Hmm, a 256Mb card doesn't hold many RAW images - about 20 - I'll need a LOT of them to last me 3.5 weeks (Probably about 10 at least)

Ah, yeah, I wish my camera had a raw mode.