Pros: Massive storage, great sound, superb Apple design, long battery life, navigation enhancements
Cons: Still scratches easily, included earbuds are lousy, be sure to upgrade
The bottom line: Best non-touch screen iPod yet. Industry-leading sound quality and ease-of-use, combined with huge capacity, amazing battery life and new interface enhance the user experience.
More than three years ago, I wrote a review about my first iPod, a 20 GB 4th gen model. I'm now on my third iPod, after having an 80-GB 5th gen model.

For me, the iPod Classic is the best non-touch screen iPod Apple has yet produced, and I'll tell you why in this review.

The New Stuff

Smooth Interface
The box for the iPod Classic shows the now-standard iPod menu options, but also shows a portion of an album cover. I didn't really now how that would work. As it happens, half of the screen is a random "slide show" for cover art, when a music-related menu option is highlighted. When you scroll to video, it displays the "screen capture" for random videos. And, for photos, it's random photos....are you sensing a pattern yet? The "Extras" option displays the date and time...at least on mine it does.

The effect is less impressive than it would be with full screen implementation (meaning, perhaps the album artwork and other items could be displayed full screen under the menu options; maybe the menu options can fade out when not in use...Apple, are you listening?). Still, it feels a little warmer than just a utilitarian menu with no personality.

Cover Flow
Part of the new interface is the now-famous Cover Flow. As with iTunes, the iPhone or the iPod Touch, users can scroll through their albums by viewing the album covers. Because one cannot interact with this feature the way one can with the iPhone or iPod Touch, it is less impressive. But, I do like how, when one selects an album, the full track listing with track times is displayed, as it is with those other models. It is a good feature, but feels slightly gimmicky because the full functionality isn't incorporated.

Extra Info
One small, new feature is that when scrolling through your music and viewing songs and albums, the iPod will now display the artist, and in album view, you also see a small thumbnail of the coverart. This is a nice touch.

What I would prefer is that when scrolling by song, the artist AND album is included. That way I'll have an easier time of finding the right version of "Stairway to Heaven", rather than trying to pick my way through the 40 versions on my Pod...and that's no exaggeration.

In-song options
With the 5th gen iPod, when listening to a song, a click of the center wheel would bring up the "song scroll" bar (that's probably not what it's really called), allowing the user to easily advance or rewind the song. A second click would display the cover art, a third click would allow the user to rate the song (1-5 stars) and the last click would display song lyrics, if the song file included them (that means manually adding them, as far as I know).

With the iPod Classic, one can no longer view the album art in large display, which doesn't seem like a big loss to me. Now, the second click is for rating, and the third click is the cool part: you can change the random play option, choosing from "Off," "Songs" or "Albums." I use random play most of the time when I listen to my iPod, but I also listen quite often with random play turned off. With previous iPod models, if I wanted to switch, I had to "menu out" of the song, go to the Settings option and change the random mode. Now, I can do it right in the song menu. Thank you Apple! (And, the fourth click still brings up lyrics, in case you were wondering.)

Games
The Classic comes with three new games. Klondike is solitaire with a groovy score and fancy animations. Vortex is Brick Breaker or whatever it's called these days, but played in a cylindrical environment. It's rather addictive. The third game is iQuiz, which is trivia. It's okay.

Various stuff
The 80-GB model I have is amazingly slender. I think it's even slimmer than my 20-GB model from 2004.

The front face of the iPod is now a black aluminum metal-type material. The back is the same very scratch-able high gloss. Protecting the finish of the iPod, and especially the screen, is very important. I have actually never touched my iPod directly, as I had an Invisible Shield (visit http://www.shieldzone.com/item_description/APIPCL80F.html) put it on it as soon as I got it out of the box. I can't recommend the Invisible Shield highly enough. It lets you protect the iPod without sticking it in an ugly and cumbersome case.

Battery life should please even the most on-the-go road warriors. Tests I am aware of put video playback at close to seven hours and audio playback at 36!

When syncing with iTunes, the display on the iPod is also new. Now big deal, again, but it's all about presentation!

Same Old Good Stuff
Great sound and video. I rip my songs using AAC format and 192 KBPS.
Handy search function
Stopwatch and clock
Photo support
Contacts and calendars

Playlists
My iPod listening is dominated by playlists, both basic and "Smart." With a Smart Playlist, you can hear exactly what you want. On my Pod, I’ve got some classical music and lots of live stuff. I don’t want to hear that stuff when I shuffle my songs, so I have a Smart Playlist that omits those categories. And creating a Smart Playlist is easy to do, and you can use a wide variety of criteria: date added to the Pod, year the music was released, bit rate, genre, personal rating, length of song, date last played, songs starting with a certain letter or ending with a certain letter (!), etc. The options are not quite endless, but the possibilities are.

The great thing about smart playlists is that the iPod will automatically adjust on the fly. For example, if you have a playlist that only includes songs that haven't been played before, once you play a song, it is removed from the playlist. No need to sync with iTunes, the iPod is smart enough to do it on its own.

Final Thoughts
The Apple iPhone is, as I hear it, the coolest tech device ever designed. A few of my friends have them and I've fiddled around with them. Yeah, they are cool. But until Apple delivers an iPhone or iPod Touch that is at bare minimum 30 GB (I would still hesitate at 30 GB...40 would be much better), I won't bite. And, according to ilounge.com (a great resource for all iPod questions), "the less expensive iPod classic now boasts Apple’s best-sounding audio." (http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/ipod/review/apple-ipod-touch-8gb-16gb/).

For me, right now, the iPod Classic is the way to go for people who have large music collections and want it all on their portable device. The key is presentation. The music doesn't change, but the full Classic user experience is superior in every way. It also helps to have iTunes as an industry-leading way to manage your music.