They look cool. Cool as fuck.
I’m on my second pod, a 60GB classic with video, nearly 2 years old so I hope I won’t need an upgrade too soon. I love the touch - great big screen for videos, but 16GB that’s a bit small. The 160GB classic is more my size, I think with that capacity I can put ALL my music on, a luxury I have not yet enjoyed (even though I’ve got enough music to play solidly for 2 months, it’s still not enough).
So a nice development, but I guess I’ll be waiting a year or so yet - maybe get the phone, or wait for the touch to get a memory upgrade.
Conversely, I also just bought a Sony Walkman mp3 player for running. Absolute rubbish. The software is horrendous and they don’t have a mac version so I have to fire up the old pc whenever I want to put new tunes on it. It is an awful cheap version of itunes that looks shitty (really early-90s style graphics) takes forever to process tracks and then doesn’t organise them properly - ie when an album has more than 1 disc, it clumps the tracks in together so that you get disc 1, track one, followed by disc 2, track 1 then disc 1, track 2 etc. Completely kills all those beautiful segues! And it’s not loud enough too. Running out in the open, near busy traffic, I need the music loud!
Walkman used to be synonymous with mobile music - one of those brand names that defines the product like Hoover, Jacuzzi or Sellotape. They have thrown away all that cache with sloppy products. I can’t help thinking that one of the reasons that iPod is so successful is because Sony have dropped the ball so spectacularly.