I’ve been using my 4th generation iPod (monochrome screen, 20GB) for a little bit more than a year now, and although it’s a great music player in terms of its ease of use, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I would change about it to make it more powerful and efficient.

First of all, the iPod’s simplicity lies in its unique click wheel, where all you have to do to scroll down a list of choices to select the song(s) you want played is move your finger in a circular motion. This is an award winning way and it has proved advantageous for Apple.

There are many in the media and on the Internet iPod user community who believe the next iteration of Apple’s iPod will include a larger screen for viewing videos, which means it would get rid of the traditional click wheel and instead opt for an on-screen representation which you would simple use as a click wheel. I believe Apple can do better than that with a touch screen system in place.

Instead, I suggest that further utilization of the touch screen would be the key to making the iPod more intuitive and user friendly. Apple should include the capability for the user to quickly find the song they want by browsing with smart search. The user should be able to write, with his finger, the first few letters of the song/artist/whatever (depends on what screen they’re on) and have the iPod jump to that location. With the advent of cheaper storage, people find themselves storing more and more songs on their MP3 players and it becomes a chore to scroll through pages of titles just to find what they are looking for. With this system of smart searching by finger scribbling in a search query, the new touch screen iPod will save users time and make scrolling a secondary task. We have the technology to do this.
Another thing I suggest adding to the iPod would be the implementation of a sudden motion sensor (SMS), such as the ones Apple features in its MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. Such a chip is relatively inexpensive and will save time in the thousands of warranty repairs from users who drop their iPods by accident. Upon sensoring a sudden fall, the iPod will park the hard drive in a safe location and no critical files will be damaged.

Just some thoughts while listening to my iPod on the walk home from work.

This ClashBang.com article was written by Chris Chu. Tired of privately venting his frustration in vain, Chris decided to share his discontent with the rest of the world.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.