If it wasn’t for the announcement of the new iPod Shuffle, you could be forgiven for thinking that the iPod’s success is making the Apple designers cocky. There have been no cosmetic changes to the revision of the 5th generation iPod Video.

There has been a capacity increase though; an 80GB model has replaced the 60GB player. It will still play back .mp3, .aac, .aiff and .wav audio files, as well as video in .mp4, .m4v and .mov formats. Out of the box the sound quality is slightly better due to the updated headphones, but there’s no discernable difference between the new and previous generation player in terms of device output.

There may not be any changes to the hardware, but the software has been given a slight overhaul. The most notable feature is the alphabetical scrolling system, which displays a letter in the middle of the screen and jumps to points in your list that begin with the displayed letter. When engaged, it reduces the sensitivity of the wheel to help you keep track of the list, and as you collection grows becomes exponentially useful.

The scrolling system is similar to the previously reviewed second generation Nano, except the Nano (being flash based) delivers hits instantaneously. As you enter characters into your search field on the hard drive based iPod, you can watch the list slowly grow as it finds new results from the hard drive. It indexes your searches, so by the time you can input text faster than results can be found, there’s a good chance that subsequent searches will already have filtered through a lot of potential results from earlier use.

It’s still a fingerprint magnet, but the front seems to be more scratch resistant than its predecessor. After we had finished using it, the silver back of the unit still showed the similar war wounds we’ve come to expect from the iPod.

Other than the software changes, the battery life has been extended to 20 hours of music playback or 6.5 hours of video playback. We are testing this and the results will appear in issue 108 of PC Authority.