Although it’s not revolutionary, Genius seems to be an entertaining new feature with the capacity of creating a 25-song playlist based on the song that’s been playing… until you start to use it.

First of all, it’s necessary to have an active account at the iTunes Store to start using the Genius function. But to activate it, you have to agree to Apple knowing and examining the content of your iTunes collection. It sounds pretty intrusive to me, but I’ve accepted the agreement: since I had hoped a Pandora-like function in my iPod. But it turns to be quite disappointing to me.

Sometimes Genius works perfectly well. You can save a playlist that you like in the Playlist menu, with the name of the track that you choose to begin your list. Other times, it’s linked songs that the most ‘creative’ DJ in the world wouldn’t dare to put together. At least, iPod gives you the Refresh option that creates a new playlist based on the same song.  But most of the time, a message saying that 'genius is unavailable for this song' has come to bug me. I’ve tried to select again all my songs and then updated Genius. It worked better, but hadn’t solved the problem so far.

Maybe I have too many songs that haven’t been included in the Genius database and, if that’s true, maybe Genius will work better in the future. According to Steve Jobs, database will be updated once a week as more and more libraries are scanned and processed. Till then, I’ll miss Pandora.