why mod?: The iPod is no longer the sign of the early adopter that it was several years ago. It's ubiquitous, and that's why we strive to somehow make our iPods more our own. The recent information on hacking the graphics in the firmware and Apple's own engraving offer are good starts, but they're more "internal" personalizations. Only you will notice them, unless the guy sitting next to you on the bus is extremely nosy. This is where iPodMods comes in. The instant you turn on the backlight on your 3G iPod and the screen is glowing blue with the buttons all different colors -- that's something the fifteen other people on the subway car don't have.

shipping your iPods away: Perhaps the hardest part of the modification process is packing up your iPod into a tiny box, insuring it for hundreds of dollars (and have the postal service guys look at the package and the weight and try to figure out what exactly you're mailing), and not seeing it for close to a week. However, the guys at iPodMods did a great job with this -- I tracked the shipment so that I knew when it arrived, the modifications were done quickly, and I got an email detailing the return information within 48 hours of receiving the arrival confirmation.

the mods: There isn't much detail to go into about the modifications -- what you see is what you get. I'm extremely happy with the color choices I made on my 3G iPod, although I'm not sure that my color choice of Orange on the blue iPod Mini was the best choice. At any rate, it's certainly distinctive. I was slightly surprised by two aspects of the mods: (1) the iPod Mini, when the backlight is turning off, goes to an intermediate brightness and then turns off; it doesn't fade out like my 3G. I can't remember if it worked this way before, and it doesn't bother me at all. (2) the 3G iPod, with the blue backlight, seems to have a slight unevenness in the blue color. Again, it doesn't bother me (I actually quite like it), and it's certainly possible that the original backlight was like this as well.

final thoughts: The staff at iPodMods deliver exactly what they advertise, and they do it in the fastest possible way. If you're looking for a way to personalize your iPod in way that distinguishes it from the others around you, this is the best solution right now. If my iPod broke out of warranty, I would definitely send it to iPodMods to fix it up.

Click for enlarged versions of my modded iPods