EphPod

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EphPod Editors' Rating Performance 8 Features 8 Service & support 6 Installation & setup 5 Interface & ease of use 5 Full Review Readers' Rating 0% 0% Rate this product List price Free Check Prices

Full Review

Troy Dreier July 10, 2002

EphPod makes your Apple iPod work with a PC. Beyond that, this application is a mixed bag. Although it includes some worthwhile features that Apple and XPlay do not, including contact syncing, EphPod has a lot to learn about ease of use. If you're a do-it-yourself type, EphPod's intricacies won't trouble you. However, if you want software that works without a lot of fine-tuning, turn to XPlay instead. Both XPlay and EphPod require software that lets your Windows PC recognise and mount Mac drives. Whereas XPlay comes with its own solution, MacDrive, built in, EphPod requires you to install either MacDrive or DataViz’s MacOpener. Although EphPod is free and comes bundled with a 15-day MacOpener demo, a full version of MacOpener will set you back $39.95 (~£26) -- a special price for EphPod users. Despite the tidy EphPod/MacOpener bundle, the two-part installation caused major problems in our tests. Once we installed the full version of MacOpener, for example, we couldn't get it to load, despite repeated reboots. Once we finally got both EphPod and MacOpener running, we had to adjust several controls in each program in order to synchronise our iPod and see its songs. Once you're ready to go, simply plug in your iPod and launch EphPod. Sadly, the EphPod interface looks about as elegant as a spreadsheet. The top of the cramped screen shows the basic iPod menus (Playlist, Artist, Songs and Contacts, along with a new item, Recent). Click one, and you'll see its contents displayed to the right, in the same window. The lower half of the window lists all the songs on your iPod in a large grid. Unfortunately, adding songs to that grid is painfully unintuitive. You can't drag songs directly into the playlist; instead, you must click the Add Songs button on the toolbar. If you create a new playlist -- there's no button to do so; you have to right-click in the playlist window, then select New Playlist -- and you want to add several songs simultaneously, you must select the playlist in the top window, highlight the songs you want to add in the bottom window, right-click the songs, then select ‘Add songs to playlist’. Although the EphPod doesn't look sophisticated, it’s strong on features. The software takes advantage of your 5GB or 10GB of iPod storage space and lets you synchronise contacts from Microsoft’s Outlook or hold any contacts in vCard format (in a special Contacts menu option on your iPod), so you can use your iPod as a makeshift PDA. If you're using Outlook, EphPod can automate contact syncing, too. EphPod can also grab the text from any Web page and load the content into contact forms, somewhat like AvantGo. EphPod also includes a built-in function that lets you download music from your iPod to your computer -- something that iTunes and XPlay both prohibit. This feature makes sharing music between computers extremely easy. If you need help outsmarting EphPod's unintuitive interface, you'll find a fair bit online. The EphPod Web site provides help documents, a link to user groups and a direct email link to the developer, who answered both of our test queries promptly and helpfully. Despite EphPod's rough spots, we think it could surpass XPlay in the future, thanks to its wealth of features. If you're after ease of use above all, stick with the more commercial XPlay. But if you have the patience and own a PC that's dying for some iPod action, give this home-grown application a try.