Today, Apple unveiled its new iPods (shuffle, nano, classic, touch) and, as expected, a brand new itunes with some new shiny functions.
The list of new functions is promising and features:
- grid view: a whole new way of interacting and seeing your albums, providing easy access to all of them through thumbnails of their album covers;
- new visualizer: great aesthetic change;
- genius playlist and sidebar: after creating a new itunes account, itunes should get the ability to analyze your tunes and group them together, providing playlists of musics that “go great together”;
So, what’s the catch?
First of all, it is the SLOWEST itunes ever.
By the time I installed it, I jumped to see the grid view. It sure is awesome as it is pretty great to browse through your albums seeing all of its covers in a way that is much more practical than coverflow. The problem is that it takes time to load. My library only has one album and it is taking like 1 sec to open it…
I plugged my iPod and accessed the summary page (by clicking on the iPod name on the left side bar). It took an astounding 5 seconds to load. Not satisfied, I started clicking on the tabs (music, movies, tv shows, etc) and each one of them took 1 second to load.
I found out that, as always, coverflow was not available for inside iPod music browsing, as the new grid view isn’t too.
The genius options requires an itunes account, which I don’t have and didn’t create. What’s the point of needing an itunes account to search your own library for music “related” to the one you are listening? I get that the itunes account shouldn’t even be needed for the cases in which the software searches for related songs on the itunes store. The account should ONLY be needed when you try to buy something.
I have noticed in previous versions that itunes was a LOT slower in windows, but this time Apple did surprise me…
Last but not least, there have been a lot of users complaining about “blue screens of death” when they plug their iPods and iPhones (according to Gizmodo).
For all that reasons, I’ll be waiting for the 8.1 which I believe might be a little bit faster and a little less bugged.
