Besides being the world’s most popular personal digital music player, the iPod is a “jack of other trades” as well. Let’s take a gander at some other the iPod’s other “talents”.

Games. OK, the iPod is certainly not a PlayStation Portable or GameBoy, but it does contain a few diversions to amuse oneself while waiting for a train, plane, or automobile. There’s Solitaire (the most world’s most popular Windows “productivity” application), Bricks, Parachutes, and Music Quiz. They’re especially nice on the iPod photo’s color screen.

A computer in your pocket. An iPod (except the new iPod shuffle, which uses flash RAM) is, at its essence, a portable hard drive. It connects to your Mac or PC using either FireWire or USB 2.0. Both of these connections are fast enough that you can actually install a complete system full of software on the iPod (assuming the you have enough room on it) and boot (start up and run) a computer from it - just as if your computer was running off its internal hard drive (although a bit slower). Now, to be honest, I don’t know if this works with a Windows PC – if you’ve done it, I’d love to hear about it. Even if you don’t install a fully bootable system, you can certainly backup and transport your “Home” folder containing your email, browser preferences, personal documents, etc.

In any case, anything you can store on your computer, you can carry around on an iPod. For example, movies. Your own home movies, or DVDs compressed into QuickTime and other movie formats. No, you can’t actually watch the movies on the iPod’s tiny screen (would you really want to?), or hook the iPod up to watch the movies on a TV (yet). But you can connect the iPod to a computer and watch the movies there.

PDA (personal data/digital assistant). Although you can’t make any of the traditional PDA stylus/keyboard inputs to an iPod once it’s disconnected from your computer, you can load it up with lots of handy reference information that you can access as fast as your finger can scroll. You can export contacts and calendar data from your Mac’s Address Book, or iCal, or Microsoft Entourage or Palm Desktop (anything that stores and exports information in vCard or vCalendar or iCalendar format) onto your iPod for easy viewing. Heading into uncharted territory? Save MapQuest directions in a text file in Rich Text Format (.rtf), load it into the “Notes” folder on your iPod, and read it “on the go” later.

Books and “Podcasts”. There are more than 8,000 audiobooks available through the iTunes Music Store. The iPod will even set a bookmark for you when you stop “reading” (OK, it’s really listening), letting you pick up later where you left off. The iPod has also inspired a new form of internet-based “broadcasting” called “Podcasting”. Talk shows, “news magazines”, and other spoken content information is made available in audio format for downloading directly to the iPod.

Photos. The iPod photo can double as a portable presentation projector. Export your Keynote presentation slides into separate images in JPEG format. Drop the resultant images into iPhoto, then import them onto an iPod photo. Connect the iPod photo to any television or projector (preferably the big-screen in the board room), and run the show right from the iPod. Plus, this week Apple announced availability of the $29 iPod photo Camera Connector. Attach your digital camera directly to your iPod photo and download images onto it for viewing on the iPod photo or a TV.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski