The iPod

Long time ago I used to run with a Sony Walkman. It was quite bulky and inconvenient. I mean who listens to audiotapes these days :-). I tried CD players but they skip a lot. And yes, even those that boast of the anti skip feature. It didn’t take me long to switch to a flash based MP3 player when my wife gifted me iriver FP 799T. I think it is one of the better MP3 players out there. It comes loaded with features. Some of the things I liked were:

• Standard arm band (iPod, in contrast forces you to fork out another $29)
• When you wear it on the arm (usually during running), its screen is slightly tilted towards you. This makes it easier to work with it without breaking the stride.
• 40 hrs of listening time for a single AA battery
• Decent amount of memory (1G)
• Reasonably priced (around $160)

Things I didn’t like about it were

• Navigation button is difficult to operate. If you don’t click it in exactly the right angles you won’t get the desired effect
• No bookmark feature for audiobooks or podcasts
• The ‘cool’ factor is missing
• Music Manager is no match to iTunes

I think I read it in The Life’s Little Instruction Book something to this effect: once in a while you should just get what you really want. So I decided to gift the iriver to my brother and buy an iPod nano :-).

Here is the strange thing:

• It’s not reasonably priced ($249 for 4G)
• Most of things I needed (like armband) are not standard
• No FM tuner, voice recording feature etc.
• It needs to be connected to a PC for charging (unless you buy a separate charger)
• It doesn’t have the tilt screen (as described above)

And still I love it more that the iriver. Why? Because it makes an ordinary song sound extraordinary, it is extremely easy to operate and it does have the ‘cool’ factor. Not to mention the podcasts, photos and iTunes.

When buying a product you can weigh the pros and the cons all you like but Once in a while you should just get what you really want.