I felt no need for an MP3 player and although I thought of iPod as a nice little toy, I didn’t WANT one as I didn’t find much time to listen to music anyway..An impulsive buy a few days ago after I held it in my hand for the first time surprised me and worried me - afterall, it wasn’t a small amount of money. After I uploaded a few tunes on it my remorses have gone away.

iPod is a stunning gadget, probably the most beautiful one, and I’ve had many. If you have a sense for detail you’ll appreciate it even more. Handling, navigation in the menu, the touch sensitive surface, all is an ingenious work of art.

Recommendation - don’t try to save money on the remote if you plan to use your iPod outside.

Message for WinXP users - please follow my instructions to upload songs for the first time on your iPod. If a good soul somewhere hasn’t written them on the ipodlounge, I’d be lost and very distressed. Here we go:
1) Charge up the battery.
2) Go to apple.com/ipod and download the newest updater (2.1 now) and install it.
3) Connect your iPod to your PC. Go to my computer and format the removable drive that appears there with FAT32. This will take up to 20 mins, so don’t worry.
4) Now run the iPod updater which you installed in step 2.
5) After the updater puts the necessary EPROM information on your iPod it will tell you to plug it into the power supply to flash the ROM.
6) After you plug it into power supply flashing starts and after a few minutes you are ready.
7) Install iTunes (apple.com/itunes/download) and connect your iPod. You’re set. It works like a charm. Not to mention the incredible speed with which gigabytes of songs will transfer to you iPod.

The above has save me lot of nerves, and from what I read some people actually returned their iPods because the process for WinXP wasn’t documented. Apple should do something about it, perhaps their website, hint-hint?

As for the headphones, I’m quite an audiophile and they are very good, not too big too, like many say.

Good luck and many enjoyable listening hours.

iPod has changed the way I listen to music…