Flossing About The Size Of Your iTunes Library Is <i>So</i> 2006

When it comes to iPod-related innovations, Apple isn’t known for its modesty or passivity. Steve Jobs once convened a press conference just to show off a glorified boombox. That’s why we’re a bit mystified by the so-quiet-you’d-think-it-was-for-Zune release of the newest addition to Apple’s small collection of iPod mini-games: iQuiz. One week later, we’re waiting for music-trivia geeks nationwide to start poking around with this thing.

Fifth-generation iPods have come with a Music Quiz game for a couple of years now. If you’ve ever been bored enough to click on it, you were treated to a clever, low-tech game that played samples of songs from your ‘Pod and threw up multiple choices of song titles, also from your collection. iQuiz isn’t much higher-tech than that, and the obvious difference is an improvement in the graphics (including some ill-advised game-show music that, mercifully, you can turn off). Here’s the clever part: Apple made iQuiz customizable, and gave it the power to track lifetime scores.

The game comes with a few hundred music-trivia questions, which, if you’re reading this site, you’ll run through in a fraction of a day. (They’re actually fairly smart questions, but I kept getting the one asking me to name the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime over and over.) But once you get bored, you can write your own quizzes and send them to friends for uploading into their iPods. Below, your Guest Idolator offers a 10-question sample quiz he threw together over the weekend, when he should’ve been out enjoying New York’s summerlike weather.

Apple clearly wants this thing to take off–they’ve priced iQuiz at 99 cents, five bucks cheaper than all the other iPod games. We give it about a month before someone on the series of tubes creates a site to start trading custom iQuizzes, complete with people bragging about their SAT-like iQuiz prowess (three wrong answers kills a 10-question round, so one bad round of trivia will drag your lifetime average down). The quizzes you create don’t have to be about music, of course, and iQuiz actually comes with sets of trivia about movies and TV. It’ll be interesting to see who ends up dominating the iQuiz geekery: 24 obsessives, or Fall Out Boy fans.

Chris Molanphy’s iQuiz Pack [link expired] iQuiz [Apple]