That’s good, but can it store digital photos from memory cards?

Touch screen buttons huh … I had a watch once (well I still do) with touch screen … it broke in just under a year (two of the buttons, one of which was functoinally important, stopped working). Took it to the only authorised Casio dealer in Canberra, he took it but then gave it back after a week saying he couldn’t fix it (apparently cleaning the assembly and replacing parts of the touch screen didn’t work like he’d hoped).

Hope that doesn’t happen to an iPod, coz I’d much rather have something that has moving buttons than something that has a 1 year use-by date.

Also how portable is it really? Touch screens of this sort are renowned for not working after any sort of water contact or pressure change. So get it rained on (not even gonna mention the word ‘immersion’), it dies. Take it travelling on a plane, overseas to a colder climate, it probably won’t live too long. My watch was immersed in sea water briefly (<1 second as I snatched my hand out), but seemed to survive that, then I went ovserseas to icy Russia and when I came back it stopped working (as it happens with the time set to Russian time, and the button that set the time broken), though I’d had intermittent problems with the touch screen before that. I’m not sure whether any or all of this is what killed the watch, but fact is it didn’t last more than one year. (Still works apart from those two buttons). I wonder how functional an iPod would be without the buttons working?

I would place my faith in Apple’s industrial design, they seem to be extremely good on that sort of thing. If it’s a problem in this version of the iPod, they’ll fix it in the next. It’s not really a “touchscreen” as opposed to a touch-sensitive button. The lifts in the law building use those sorts of buttons, and goodness knows how many grubby fingers have jabbed them over the last decade and they still work flawlessly (even if the lift doors don’t).

I can’t believe I’m plugging the company that makes the Mac, but I am.

I just can’t see how the massive added cost of the ipod over something like the Nex ( http://www.frontierlabs.com/ ) (which I have, and thoroughly love).

Yes 30 gig is nice, but with a 256 meg CF my Nex gives me about 5 hours of music. Which is the longest I can ever really see me ever using it for anyway.

Primary function is playing of music, everything else is a wank in my eyes.

True, but I would be more inclined to take a music device along with me if it had additional functions. There are many times when I’ve gone over to a friend’s house and wanted to grab a few gigs of media, but have nothing to do it with (and it obviously won’t fit on anything but a stack of CD-Rs). If you want something that sticks to the bare basics, fine. But it if gives extra features *that you will actually use*, then that is better. Convergence is only a good thing if you use all the features, and it doesn’t come too much at the expense of size. (A PDA with integrated mobile phone is good, but it’s generally much bigger than a small mobile. The iPod on the other hand, packs a lot more stuff on something smaller than a lot of MP3 players.) I don’t think anyone will have 30 gigs on their playert, but I can see people having 5 gigs so they don’t have to keep chopping and reloading songs, and you have a 25 gig portable hard drive to boot.

Fuzzy has raised an interesting point, and reminded me of the reason I never take more than one or 2 cds along with my mp3 cd player. Each cd contains 6-8 hours of music (depending on quality of mp3s which in turn depends on their source … sadly not everyone encodes stuff at 192kbps or above like they should =( ). Now the player runs on 2xAAA batteries inside and has an external attachment holding an extra 2xAA batteries. The AAAs (650mAh each) give out after about 45 minutes, whereas the beefier 1800mAh AAs last around 3-3.5 hours (I think the rating on the AAAs is a lie =P). Obviously they’re NiMH rechargeables and to my knowledge you can’t buy anything with more capacity in that form factor. So (btw Fuzzy, how the hell do you figure that 256mb = 5 hours of mp3s??), how long do the batteries on an iPod last? How much choice do you want? Do you really want to carry around with you every song you ever owned with you? (I find I only occasionally listen to most of them, and only like the recent stuff.. even with all of them in my playlist and winamp on shuffle I find I just hit next track repeatedly until I get one I want)

As for using it like a portable hard drive – can you connect it without the dock? If you need the dock then it’s instantly way less portable. If not, how many disk operations can it handle before batteries give out? I imagine it uses ram caching to avoid spinning the disk much during playback but how does it stand up to constant copying? Can it be connected to some power source without the dock (at your friend’s house, who doesn’t have a corresponding iPod with a dock you can use)? Will you have the cables with you (once again, it’s less portable than it seems). Let’s face it, if you weren’t planning to getting a few gig of media from the outset you won’t be ready for it even with an iPod (certainly not if you spent the train trip to your friend’s house listening to some tunes).

Now the 30gb model costs US$499 according to apple’s site (maybe you can get it elsewhere for less), by comparison an external 3.5″ IDE drive case capable of taking any 3.5″ IDE device including most notably a hard drive, and supporting both USB 2.0 and Firewire connections costs A$90 at the computer fair. Add to that the cost of a 40gb 7200rpm hard drive (can’t buy anything less these days, besides I bet the iPods aren’t packing 7200rpm and it makes a difference for copying large amounts of data) which is around A$120. For the change you can buy a more reasonable mp3 player.

hmm…doesn’t work

ok, seems to be working now.

I wanted to say that it’s a shame I can’t find an MP3 player that has AM and FM functions – and before you hammer me, AM talkback is annoying, but they have sports events on there that I wish to hear at times.