On Sunday, Kathleen and I trekked out to the Apple Store at The Plaza at King of Prussia in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. We had some business to do there and were curious to see the Fifth Generation iPods, since neither of us had held one in our hands before.

I was surprised at how different the 30 Gigabyte iPod with Video Playback felt in my hand than previous iPods. Most of my iPod usage experience comes from the 10-Gigabyte iPod that I gave my wife for Christmas two years ago.

The new iPods are almost exactly the same height and width, but they are about half as thick. The 30-Gigabyte model is 0.43 inches deep, while Kathleen's 10-Gigabyte iPod is 0.78 inches. The 60-Gigabyte model is 0.55 inches deep. The Fifth Generation iPods we looked at on Sunday weigh in at 4.8 or 5.5 ounces, compared to 6.5 ounces for my wife's iPod.

I thought the new iPods were wider than the old ones, but that's probably because the screen are 2.5-inch diagonal color screens while the older iPods are 2-inch diagonal in the same space. The resolution of the new screens is roughly twice as good: 320x240 color, while the old ones are 160 x 128 black and white.

We compared the black and white models of the iPod with video playback, to see which one we preferred. Kathleen felt that the black model had better contast when we were watching movie trailers and music videos that had been preloaded on the Apple Store demo units. I wasn't sure. My concern was which one would show more scratches if I bought it. I think this is less of a concern with units shipping today than those shipped immediately after these models were announced,

I want to make a couple of comments about traffic in our local Apple Store. I was surprised at how easy it was for us to spend time playing with the Video iPods. Most people in the store seemed to be engaged in two other tasks:

1. Standing in line to buy iPods as gifts for friends or relatives. Those people were generally on a mission and didn't do any playing with merchandise.
2. Looking for iPod accessories to purchase. The area stocked with iPod cases, aftermarket earphone, and external speakers was quite crowded and people were spending a lot of time there. We got away from that part of the store as fast as we could.

The demographics of the two groups was also quite different. The first group was generally parents, grandparents, and young adults with plenty of disposable income. The second group was considerably younger.

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