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While I can see certain shortcomings of it, I still generally like my iPod. Being someone who doesn’t own a watch or a mobile phone, I’m also quite fond of the iPod’s auxiliary features like the phonebook and the fact that it displays the time. When developing films last weekend I used the iPod’s clock mode to ensure that I got the right timings. It’s not as nice as a separate timer but it does give a reasonably large display of the time.
While doing this I had more than enough time to actually look at that clock, waiting for the seconds to pass. Watching the iPod clock closely reveals that it’s not running smoothly. Some seconds seem to be really long ones on my iPod’s clock while others pass by really quickly. Very odd. If Apple can’t program the iPod’s clock in a way that seconds pass at a constant speed, why don’t they just display the time in an HH:MM format?
Enjoy the film demonstrating what I describe above, if you have a compatible plug-in in your web browser. The effect can be very clearly seen around 0:55:33.
That’s especially odd considering the iPod has a dual set of StrongARM CPUs, which should have little trouble that all displaying time accurately while doing other processing in the background.
I have just checked on my iPod mini (1G) which shows the same effect after a few seconds.
