So, I have finally discovered the wonder of the iPod. Actually, it was back in late August, early September that I made the discovery. I always wondered what the big deal was about the iPod — not the big deal about what a digital music player was — this I knew already.I had a D-Link MP3 player about 5 years ago (with a whole 32 MB on it) — it was a piece of garbage but it had no moving parts and played back music while I exercised. A little more recently, I had a Rio “Sport” MP3 player (did WMA, too) that was anything but usable for sport. It repeatedly fell out of it’s plastic case when I jogged, and I ended up using duct tape to hold it in place. Nothing ruins your jog like dragging your MP3 by your ear bud and having to stop to snap its plastic halves back together … literally.
Based on these past experiences with digital music players, I could never justify shelling out the bucks for the iPod. Also working against it was that I would only consider disk-less players since I used them primarily during exercise. And though the iPod Mini was disk-less, I jsut couldn’t get past paying that much money for a digital music player.
So about 6 months ago, I started hearing more noise about the iPod Nano and its smaller counterpart the Shuffle. And was finally swayed by a bunch of marketing hype. Yup. Hype got my money … well that is, Apple and Nike. They blew me away with the whole Nike+iPod gimmick. Now you could have a digital music player that could also speak wirelessly to a digital pedometer stuck in the sole of your shoe. I did realize immediately that this meant you had to buy an iPod Nano, buy the 2 piece Nike gizmo that connected to the iPod and went in your shoe and, oh yeah, you had to buy a pair of Nike shoes to hold one half of said gizmo. I’ll reserve the remainder of my Nike+iPod diatribe for a future post, but, really, marketing hype aside, this is one very cool system and it actually works … provided you meet the minimum equipment requirements.
Once I finally got my hands on the iPod Nano, I could immediately tell the difference between it and the other excuses for digital music players I had owned. It is far superior. Now I finally understand what all the rage is about. My only complaint is that two weeks after I bought my black 4GB Nano, Apple launched the “new” Nano. I could care less about the color choices with the new Nano, but I could have had 8GB for what I paid for 4GB or still bought 4GB for a heck of a lot cheaper which would have left me more money to blow on the all that iPod or Nike+ hype … or rather accessories … that are now must haves.
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