Wahoo! I just finished replacing the battery and flash drive in my iPod Mini. It was time consuming, delicate, and fairly easy. I now have a 15 gig flash based (no more moving parts) iPod Mini.
Thank God. The old battery won’t last a whole day at work. Maybe 4-5 hours. The flash memory should use less power and the battery has gone from 400 mAh to 650 mAh. That should easily last a day.
The battery was $20 with screw drivers and instructions. The flash drive was $90 for a slow 16 gig. 4, 6, and 8 gig drives are much more reasonably priced. These drives are commonly used in professional cameras, instead of those little thumbnail size SD cards.
The 15 gig is cool. When I was researching new mp3 players I discovered that there are no 15/16 gigs. It’s 1, 2, 4, 6, 8. Then hard drive based at 30, 80, 160.
There’s no way I will use all the space, because the Mac I sync to doesn’t hold the whole music library. That 30+ gig monster is on another machine. The Mac has 70 gig for data. 30 gig would be about half of the whole drive. No Thanks.
There was a tricky part. After everything was back together I couldn’t get the iPod to work. Eventually, I got it to restore the firmware and that fixed it. Funny thing. iTunes had no problem sync’ing, but coughed up furballs afterwards. The iPod would attach, sync, eject. Over and over. It was very annoying.
In related news I got lucky at the Camera store yesterday and picked up an iPod Mini dock. The Mini has been discontinued for years. I couldn’t believe they had a dock, but it was disappointing. I thought is should have come with a cable. Two would make life easier. Unfortunately, it’s just a heavy block of plastic with a dock connector and line out. So, the iPod can stand up while it charges instead of lay down. Whoopee.