10.8.08

Ipod and its habitat


I still remember that day. I was window shopping at City Center, which is present in the suburb of Salt Lake in the antique city of Kolkata. City Center is a swanky new shopping mall that has come up, and people like me who has nothing to do during the weekends would bunch up together and end up here. Most of the time we would be window shopping, buying a T Shirt or Jeans that is absolutely unnecessary from the shoppers stop at the exorbitant prices kept as discount. The already out of limit Credit Card would be used for this. The remaining time we would be roaming around giving ratings (I will write comprehensively about this in another post) finally having a pizza in the Meal for two for Rs150/- offer at pizza hut. On one such trip I visited this newly opened Apple showroom. Till then I have never seen an Ipod except on the internet and in magazines. May be because of hearing a lot about it, the moment I saw the gadget, I was in love. In a whim, I decided to be a proud owner of it. In a week, I bought a shining black Ipod. The first song I heard using the iconic white earphones is “Ramachakkani Seethaki” from the movie Godavari. Hearing that beautiful song on them, a rich noise free sound produced at proper bass giving life to the music is a great experience.

To my heart break the earphones were broken in a week when they mistakenly fell under the tyres of my friend's motor bike. At that moment I was introduced to the world of Ipod accessories which a popular technology blogger called Ipod habitat. I entered it in search of earphones to replace my broken ones. The Apple's earphones were extremely costly forcing me to look for other options. Some of the earphones that match the quality of Apple's earphones or surpasses them are bose, sennheiser,bang and olufsen and some more which are much much more costlier than the Apple ones. Finally I bought the apple earphones again. But you cannot spend all the time plugging the earphones in your ears. The ears start itching after an hour or two of wearing them. I needed a speaker system where I can hear to the songs on my Ipod. There are atleast 150 or more models of speakers available to compliment the Ipod. Most of them have the facility of charging the Ipod when it is plugged in. Some have a digital clock with an alarm and you can specify the song with which you want to start your day. The ones that are very popular are Bose Ipod speaker system, Apple's own Ipod speaker system, Jamo and some others that are not at all in the range of owning them. A better idea is to buy computer speakers with woofers of popular brands like creative and charging the Ipod from an external power source. This is what I did. I bought creative 2.1 speakers and an additional charger for the Ipod. It produced fairly good output at a very good economical cost compared to the highly priced ones. I later upgraded to Bose Companion 2 series after I came to Australia.

Move on from earphones and speakers, you get lots of accessories for the Ipod from skins, socks, fm transmitters, car speaker connectors, travel chargers, Digital photo storage to special edition cars that have the capability to play the Ipod, pedometers and lots more. There are lots of softwares too that can be added to your Ipod from games, dictionaries, city maps, books, audio books, pod casts and so on.

Whatz more? There is also a linux distribution available specially designed for Ipod, Podzilla if you got bored with the current apple's operating system for the Ipod. Download it from ipodlinux.org
and try it out.

No comments: