My portable music player history has been rather colorful. When I was small (like 7 years old or so), I had an old Sony Walkman. When I say ‘old’, I mean antique. It was already like 10 years old when I got it. But it served me well and if I’m not mistaken it still works, although I don’t have any Cassettes to test it out with. After Cassettes became antiquated, I moved onto a CD Walkman. It was huge and had no Shock Absorption whatsoever, so listening to music while walking was nearly impossible. While I lived in England, the MiniDisc hit the market and at the time, it was marketed as the CD-killer. So I got one and then another one. Both were neat gadgets, but since MD albums cost 1,5x the price of normal CD albums, they never really took off. The players were small, just a little smaller than a 3,5″ floppy disk, but the actual discs lacked storage space and recording music onto them was a real bitch — you had to listen though the entire song/album to get it onto the disc.
So as MiniDiscs died, I went on using my CD Walkman. When Napster and the mp3 hit the Internet, I stopped using my Walkman. It wouldn’t play burned CDs anyway, so it was as good as useless. I had a mp3-CD Walkman for a while but after mp3 players started coming out, I pretty much lost interest in lugging around a player the size of a discus.
I had an old 3rd Gen 20GB iPod Classic which was previously my brother’s. I didn’t have it for long though, as it soon gave up on life. I went on to use a memorystick/mp3-player -thing. It was light and the battery life was phenomenal, but it had less than a gigabyte of storage space, making it a rather sorry excuse for an mp3 player. I’ve always liked the iPod design, especially the Minis and the Nanos. The bigger models have been good looking too but always way too bulky for my taste, and having an excess of 8GB of music with you at once just seems utterly pointless.
So now I own an 8GB iPod Touch. And I love it. I’ve been using it for about 3 weeks now and trying out all the neat little features it has. I’ve modded the Touch a little, enabling 3rd party software and installed some extra applications; mainly most of the main software found on the iPhone. Google Maps and the Mail application are especially useful. There are quite a few open WiFi networks around in the center of Helsinki so getting online isn’t a big problem. The touchscreen is works surprisingly well (I had my doubts) and the multitouch intergration with the browser works fantastically - there’s a “pinch” feature, with which you can use two fingers to zoom in and out by ‘pinching’ them together while touching the screen. [Here's Apple's tour of the iPod]
In retrospect, the 16GB version might have been a better buy since it was only 50€ more with twice the storage space. But since I don’t really movies off of the Touch, the 8GB is fine. For a longer journey, you could balance having less music and more videos, but I usually prefer filling the majority of the space with music.
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