More and more students are singing the praises of their iPods as the number of white earbuds grows exponentially around campus these days.
For many users, the iPod is so easy to set up to play their entire music collection that they hardly look beyond its basic functions to see the wide variety of extras available to them. They are immediately satisfied with the music that is blasting their eardrums.
\I really thought that the iPod mainly just played music,"" said Lindsay Juley, a UW-Madison freshman and iPod owner. ""I knew there were games, but I think most people just buy it for music and they don't really think about all the other things an iPod can do. It's pretty cool but not a lot of people know about it.""
However, the extra features available for the iPod deserve a deeper look, as they can better organize and entertain the lives of their owners.
The iPod's calendar feature allows users to store appointments, special dates and to-do lists on their iPod. Mac users can create calendars and sync this information through iCal and iSync, both free applications from www.apple.com. Those on Windows can create calendars using Microsoft Outlook, Palm Desktop or another scheduling application and export the calendars in vCal format (filenames end in a .vcs). Then they must drag these files into the Calendars folder in the iPod.
One date iPod users may want to mark on their calendar this year is Oct. 23. It marks the fourth anniversary of their beloved gadget's introduction, and quite possibly the birth of a musical technological revolution.
In little over three years, Apple has sold more than 10 million iPods, almost half of those sales in the last six months. It is possible that part of the reason iPods have become so popular on the UW-Madison campus is because of students' ability to purchase the product on campus. The DoIT Tech Store on campus has sold approximately 2,700 various iPods in the last year alone, making it the biggest selling hardware product in the store.
""The iPod has become one of the must-have items, especially for the college demographic,"" said Mark Rademacher, a UW teaching assistant dealing with mass media and consumers.
The iPod's song capacity and portability, Rademacher added, quickly appealed to college students who are constantly on the go or want to instantly show off the breadth of their musical knowledge without having to display their CD collection.
The iPod allows users to place small text files (under four kilobytes) into the Notes folder on their iPod, which can then be viewed on the iPod screen at any time. This gives users such options as storing recipes or reading the rest of an article.
But who has time to type up notes or copy and paste news from the Internet onto their iPod? Luckily, there are now a few pieces of software that can automatically download e-mail, news, weather or stock information and place it in the Notes folder.
The most popular software title is Pod2Go, which currently only runs on Macs. However, Windows and Mac users can search for similar software on a number of download sites, including iPodLounge (www.ipodlounge.com) and VersionTracker (www.versiontracker.com). College students may particularly be interested in iCon, the complete text of the U.S. Constitution, periodicPod, a chemistry reference tool, or most likely Podtender, a mixed drink database with more than 900 recipes.
Apple does not create these additional software titles, so they are not guaranteed to work smoothly with the iPod. Also, titles listed under the Mac OS section may also work with Windows provided they are simple text files.
In addition to providing downloads, iPodlounge contains just about everything else users would want to know about iPods. This includes news, gadget and software reviews and discussion forums for ""all things iPod."" According to Adam Wiesenfarth of the DoIT Tech Store, iPodlounge has also become the foremost place for iPod users to show off the extra features they've attached to their iPods.
With a dock connector on the bottom and a headphone jack at the top, the iPod allows itself to be plugged into external devices. For those willing to shell out $35 for a Griffin iTalk or Belkin Voice Recorder, a mysterious menu called ""Voice Memos"" will appear once the device is plugged into the iPod. The iPod has now become a digital voice recorder, able to record hours of lectures, meetings or interviews for journalism stories, which then automatically downloads the voice memos to iTunes once the iPod is plugged back into the computer.
Owners of digital cameras can free up their disk space by uploading their photos onto an iPod, either through the Belkin Media Reader, which reads external flash media, or the new Belkin Digital Camera Link, which directly links the digital camera to the iPod.
These devices take advantage of the iPod's function as a hard drive, which means any files can be stored on the iPod as a way to backup important files or transfer them between computers.
""It's very handy for file transfer, particularly between a Windows machine and a Mac,"" said DoIT Store Product manager Ross Yahnke, who owns 60 GB iPod Photo.
As an extreme example, during the filming of the last two ""Lord of the Rings"" films the crew stored video footage shot in New Zealand on iPods, which were then air-lifted to director Peter Jackson in England so he could see the footage on his computer.
Most users by now have no doubt played brickout, parachute, solitaire or music quiz on their iPods during brief periods of boredom. Former Badger football kicker Mike Allen, who along with the rest of the football team received a free iPod from Outback Steakhouse for participating in the Outback Bowl this January, said the games immediately ""came in handy for the long ride back home"" after the game.
But are all these extras just fun and games, or can they have a noble application? Administrators at Duke University tried to answer this question last fall by giving their entire freshman class free iPods with certain add-ons, including academic and athletic calendars. Students in several classes could also download recorded lectures to their iPods, use the voice memo function to gather field interviews, or listen to conversations in foreign languages.
According to Duke's student newspaper, reviews so far are mixed, the biggest complaint being that too many students don't attend classes which use the iPod in their curriculum, but instead use the iPod for recreational music listening.
The iPod's lack of valuable purpose for its extras may be, in the end, what stops most students here from taking advantage of them. In the meantime, the iPod will be bought and sold as a music player.
""For everybody I've talked to, it's the music function that really appeals to them,"" Rademacher said.
