Apple iPod Photo Specifications

iPod Photo

Product Brand: Apple

Editor's Rating:
3

Pros

• Large, high-resolution colour screen for viewing photos and album art
• Ability to store and view thousands of photos
• Compatible with various audio formats, including MP3 and AAC
• Long battery life for extended listening and photo viewing
• Expandable storage through the use of Compact Flash cards

Cons

• Relatively large and heavy compared to later iPod models
• Limited video playback capabilities
• No wireless connectivity or internet access
• No support for modern audio codecs such as FLAC or ALAC
• No longer supported by Apple, and may have compatibility issues with newer software and hardware.

Apple iPod Photo Review and Features

On October 26, 2004, Apple unveiled the iPod Photo in addition to the U2 edition. Positioned as a premium version of the standard fourth-generation iPod, the iPod Photo featured a 220×176-pixel LCD capable of displaying up to 65,536 colours.

The device can be attached to a television or other external display for slideshows, thanks to a bundled composite cable which fits in the headphone port (“iPod AV cable”); it is also forwards compatible with then-future dock connector-based composite and S-video accessories.

Photos are stored in a proprietary database, which iTunes can generate from JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, and PNG file formats sourced from either a folder, from Apple’s iPhoto on the Macintosh, Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 or Photoshop Elements 3.0 on Windows.

Battery life was rated 15 hours for music playback and 5 hours for slideshows with music. The iPod Photo was available in a 40GB version for US$499 and a 60GB version for US$599.

On February 23, 2005, both 40 GB models (photo and regular) were replaced with a slimmer and lower-priced (US$349) 30GB photo model leaving only a 20 GB black-and-white iPod left. The price for the 60 GB model was dropped to US$449 with fewer bundled accessories, making the dock, FireWire cable, and television cable extra-cost options.

On the same day, Apple announced the iPod Camera Connector, which allowed the instant transfer of images from a USB-compatible digital camera to the iPod Photo. The main difference between this and Belkin’s Digital Camera Link was that Apple’s unit supported instant image viewing on the iPod Photo after transfer without connecting the iPod Photo to a computer first.

On September 9, 2014, Apple discontinued the iPod Classic. The sixth-generation 160 GB iPod Classic was the last Apple product to use the original 30-pin dock connector and the distinctive click wheel.

The iPod’s operating system is stored on its dedicated storage medium. An additional NOR flash ROM chip (either 1 MB or 512 KB) contains a bootloader program that tells the device to load its OS from the storage medium.

Each iPod has 32 MB of RAM, although the 60 GB and 80 GB fifth-generation and sixth-generation models have 64 MB. A portion of the RAM is used to hold the iPod OS loaded from firmware, but most of it serves to cache songs from the storage medium.

For example, an iPod could spin its hard disk up once and copy approximately 30 MB of upcoming songs into RAM, thus saving power by not requiring the drive to spin up for each song.

Custom firmware has also been developed, such as Rockbox (up to 1G – 6G requires emCORE) and iPodLinux (up to 5G, 6G has an encrypted firmware.), which offer open-source alternatives to the standard firmware and operating system.

Full Technical Specifications