cool kid report

As previously documented, I hate the iPod nearly as much as I hate life itself. Since no one forced the iPod upon me there was only so much complaining I could do about it and since no one really understands my problem with it anyway, it was all pretty moot. Furthermore, for a long time there hadn't really been a direct competitor to the iPod. The only other player that can really be compared is the Nomad Jukebox, which was basically an iPod but CD player sized. Also the Jukebox came before the era when soulless corporations saw fit to endow their homonculi with required software. These days the Nomad products are about as bad as the iPod in terms of software. The Nomad and the iPod belong to the "microdrive" class of MP3 players, storing their data on a small internal hard drive, or in the case of the Jukebox, just an internal hard drive. Other classes include flash MP3 players which generally don't have enough storage to compete and MP3/CD players which have the same size limitations as a standard CD player (and seem to take a long time to boot.)

Personally, the storage space offered by an MP3 player was always my biggest concern. Flash players are too small, CD players about right and the iPod too big. When the Jukebox came out I considered too ridiculously large to ever be filled, and that was before they started coming out with bigger models. However, I seem to be in the minority here, everyone wants to get their hands on the massive storage of an iPod. 40,000 minutes of songs on 6 hours of battery time just doesn't make any sense to me. Apparently though, there exists a class of computer users who just want to move all their MP3s onto the MP3 player without keeping them on the computer. This makes even less sense to me. But, being a social trend, there's no precedant that it would. Anyway, the 1.5 GB SoniqCast Aireo is just the right storage size for me and except for physical dimensions (think Buick of microdrive MP3 players) and storage it beats the iPod hands down. In addition to being a standard USB mass storage device, the obvious choice of nonmonolithic business entities everywhere, it has a host of other advanced features to confuse and bewilder the common user, which I vow to cover in a future post. Probably after I buy one.

For the standard conformist to the Apple iPod trend, there's the iRiver iHP, which is also a conformist to the Apple iPod trend. The iHP, besides demonstrating Apple's failure to purchase the lowercase letter i, is pretty much everything I can tolerate about the iPod: storage size, battery life, physical size and none of the things that make me hate it: proprietary software, Apple brandname. It's an interesting point that while iPod and iTunes were my initial reason for hating Apple, I now hate them so much that the iPod can never recover in my mind. The iHP even has a much better price; it only costs $300 for the 20 GB model, instead of $300 and a human soul.