I took a road trip to Toad Suck, Arkansas a couple of weeks back. It was a very quick trip, just overnight, but I discovered one important thing about mp3 players. I was in an SUV with three other men who all had their ipods with them. I had my wife’s ipod Shuffle which is on permanent loan. I got it for her so she could use it at the gym. She does go to the gym, but watches TV there instead. She does not use it, so she lets me. I do use it. I have been looking into getting a mp3 player of my own and have been researching them, pricing them, etc. I had pretty much decided on the latest player from SanDisk, the Sansa E270. It is a 6GB flash drive mp3 player that competes with the ipod nano. I do not have extreme amounts of music, so 6GB is about right for me. The Sansa does not have an ipod docking station…..ipods do. So I have now decided that an ipod is the direction I want to go. It just makes sharing music that much easier. I felt so inferior not being able to share my music. The Shuffle does not have an ipod dock either, but I have since learned that Apple does make an add-on dock for the Shuffle. I have also learned from macrumors.com that new ipods will be out for the holidays, so I am not sure what direction I will go, but one rumor is a new 12GB nano for about $250. That would be slick. I am drooling already.
Road trip unworthiness….
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Share/shmare… what you do is get the Creative Zen M and download two movies onto it.. one for the trip there, one for the trip back.. and let the hoity-toity music dweebs talkabout their ‘music’ while you are watching good flicks..
I second that!
The Zen cost the same as the ipod video. The screen size is the same. The hard drive is the same. I’ll stick with the ipod for now. I really would like an mp3 player with flash memory, but I guess the micro hard drives have proven themselves.
The Zen can play more codecs, while th iPod is limited… Zen can play stuff frtom all over the place, iPod, mostly what iTunes will sync with.
The zen I want is a bit bigger, but the screen is 2x as big as the Iplod…
The Zen and the ipod bith have 2.5″ screens. The nano has the smaller screen, but it is designed for pics, not videos. The files the ipod plays is not limited, it just has to be loaded onto the ipod thru itunes. I can not argue about the codec issue. I am almost sure the Zen can play more. Good point.
you must buy itunes.. with itunes keeping track of every time you play a song, and sharing that information with itunes site so it can target your choices and determine how best to market you the next song you’ll buy…
welcome to the future…
I present to you the Zen Vison boycott the revolution, and go ZEN!
itunes is free, the songs are not. I have ripped about 100 cd’s at my house and they run on the shuffle just fine, as do the misc. .wav files that I have.
so your fine with Apple targeting their marketing to what songs you play.
also, you can use something like Comcast Rhapsody To Go and pay a monthly fee of 14.99 to download as many songs to your device as you want. You can’t do that with iTunes, you have to pay for each song individually.
I am all for the Zen cause my man knows his tech stuff, 😉 that and I’m not a lemming.
Y’all have a misunderstanding of itunes. All it is is software to organize your tunes. Yes, you can buy tunes thru it, but you are not required too. I could use Comcast Rhapsody To Go as well, download a full hard drive of music and just transfer them to my ipod. Very similar to any other mp3 player.
For those of us who don’t own a whole hard drive worth of music it makes a lot of sense to be able to download loads of music for a nominal fee, as opposed to paying for each individual song thru itunes. I guess that is what I was trying to say, not so much that you are limited to using ipods only. 😀 Clear as mud? LOL
I have almost 4GB of music that I can load in my wife’s 512MB ipod shuffle. I have not paid a dime to Apple, except for the price of the shuffle itself. You can buy songs thru itunes, but are not required too. All I use itunes for is to create playlists and the such, just organization, not buying music.
wow, not decades, lightyears (see other comment)