Walt Mossberg, of the Wall Street Journal, put the new video capable iPod through its paces, and shares his views in his Wednesday column. His verdict: It's an excellent music player, and surprisingly decent with video.

Although the screen is larger and has a higher resolution that previous models, it's still too small to watch a feature length movie, but works just fine for shorter things like hour long TV shows, music videos and video podcasts. Battery life was in line with Apple's specifications, but two hours for video playback on the 30GB model isn't very long.

Video playback on the iPod looked fine, but the same videos looked better playing on a Mac, which may cause some users to skip the iPod and purchase videos just to view on their desktop.

Mr. Mossberg's biggest complaint is that Apple skimped on the accessories. The dock is an extra US$39.00, and would double as a nice stand, something that's glaringly missing from the package. Most users won't want to hold an iPod through an entire episode of "Lost." Connecting your iPod to a television requires a $19.00 cable, and there is no wall charger. That's an extra $29.00. All together, that adds an extra $87.00 to the price of an iPod.

Converting home videos to the iPod format is another issue. Apple needs to release a tool that easily and reliably converts video files to a format that the iPod recognizes, and that tool should be built into iTunes, just like it is for music files.

Overall, Mr. Mossberg is quite pleased with the new fifth generation iPod, but he agrees with Steve Jobs: Think of it primarily as a music player that also does video.