[quote]ConorM wrote:
Get the Zen Touch or the Zen micro. No matter what the ipod freaks say they are equal to the ipod (I actually think better) and significantly cheaper. The Zen Micro holds an extra gigabyte of data and the Zen Touch has an extra 10 hours of battery.[/quote]
Creative customer service is among the worst in the industry. The Zen has a clumsy user interface and is just not laid out as well.
If you want cheaper, the Zen will do. If you want better, it’s not the Zen. They are definitely not “equals”.
My wife got me the 40GB iPod for Christmas. Man, I never realized how much I wanted this thing until I started using it!
2465 songs on it so far, and it hasn’t cost me a cent for online music: I’m loading our CD collection. I still have 70% of the capacity left!
It’s a friend on long road trips, a mind-soother at work, and a gab-avoider in the gym.
I bought her the iPod Mini for Easter; she loves it! We’ve got friends with iPods, Minis and Shuffles, and no one’s complained yet about cost, storage, or skipping. With a 25-minute buffer, you’d have to shake it vigorously for a long time to get a skipping problem.
And the peripherals! I got the iTrip for playing it on any FM station, with the car adapter so I don’t use battery power. She got the Griffin EarJams that fit the earbuds with a small rubber nipple that fits it more snugly in your ears (her ears are shaped oddly, I guess, because the earbuds fell out!). If you think the sound from the earbuds is good, try the EarJams! They funnel the sound more directly into your ear canal, and shut out even more ambient noise. Amazing.
When the battery goes, I’ll just buy an iPod speaker set-up (there are a few models out there already, including by Bose) with a remote control, click it into place, and have my entire CD collection ready to go in a stereophonic system smaller than a shoebox! By that time, buying a new 40GB iPod will cost even less than it did at Xmas '04.
And one other thing, while I am not 100% happy about the battery eventually dying out on my 40GB iPod, replacing it yourself is not that hard and not that expensive.