Design

The Mini comes in various colors, one of the spearheads of the whole concept. It's small and one can pick his own color to call his own. Strangely enough, there's no possibility of choosing plain, good-old white - I'd love to see what that looks like. Maybe I'm nit-picking here, but it's possible that comparing a white Mini to a white regular iPod would showcase the somewhat disappointing gain in dimension-technical quality too obviously. It's hard to say what causes this rather anti-climax-like feeling to pop up. It's a fact that the regular 4th-generation iPod is darn small. However, one has to admit that the iPod Mini isn't as "Mini' as some of us had imagined it would be.


Sure, it houses a 4GB hard disk drive and it was among the first generation of micro-HDD players, but still: the Mini is pretty extensive and not as light-weight as expected. The latter is being caused by the very solid materials - pure and very sturdy aluminum with only a few touches of plastic (at the top and bottom sides). Furthermore, while not being small in length or width, the mini is without a doubt a very slim little bugger. The rounded corners make it look as thin as a swollen-up credit card (which is good, if you might wonder) and will protect the unit from the dreaded wear-and-tear. Speaking of which: one might expect the paint to come up in a matter of days or weeks, but it turns out that this is not the case. Sure, if you're going to carve stick figures with your 16-inch machete into the Mini's exterior, the paint will budge. In normal circumstances, one won't experience any problems because of extensive usage, though. This is quite a relief after having used the regular iPod's and their very vulnerable chrome backsides.


As does the normal iPod, the Mini comes with a click wheel - it actually was the first device to introduce it. The lcd seems a bit small, since the unit's pretty sizeable in length. It looks as if Apple could have made either the lcd or the click wheel somewhat bigger. Don't expect visually entertaining elements at the back, top, bottom, left or right sides either. Just the standard headphone jack (with room for the optional remote control), a hold switch and the cradle/cable connector will have to do.

Summarizing all of this, the Mini is looking pretty okay to us. Nothing too exciting, nothing really bad either. It's just a very clean, almost dull-looking MP3-player that's even smaller than the average-day iPod v4. We doubt a 20% reduction in size deserves the "Mini"-trademark ("Midi" would have been more appropriate), and one should consider carefully what's the added value of some removed millimeters.

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