Question: What is the coolest, hottest, spankiest gadget ever?

Answer: …D-uh…

*Drum-roll* I’m insanely glad to tell you that you are facing a proud owner of one… that’s right… <shout>I own an Apple Ipod! Wohooo!</shout>

Ahem… now that I’ve got that out of the way, let me give you a walkthrough. My Ipod has a whopping 40GB space that’ll store my entire music collection (heck my entire hard-disk) and more. It also has an unbelievable interface that makes finding songs in your collection, however large it might be, much easier than you would expect – the scroll wheel particularly is an amazing invention. It’s also pretty intelligent. There is a hold button that can freeze all the buttons on the Pod when it’s not in use. And when the playback is paused for a while, the device is switched off to save power; press a button and it resumes playing back right where you left it. The buttons are pressure-sensitive feather touch buttons and combined with that amazing scroll wheel, the feel of the device is definitely out of this world =).

Ipod is also the first music player I’ve found that recognizes tags ferpectly =). You can browse songs by album, artist and genre, and it also has play counts and ratings, the two features that my favorite player on Windows supports through plugins.

I ran into some problems initially because the Ipod requires a Firewire port to work and I didn’t have one. That was pretty easy to fix though and once I got it to work, it was a music lover’s nirvana ;-). The port itself and the dock in which the player rests are also pretty wonderful – the player recharges itself when placed on the dock even while files are being transferred. I don’t know what the advantages of Firewire over USB 2.0 are, but the former definitely seems much faster – it transferred my ~7G collection in about 10 minutes, which is pretty fast.

I think that’s enough boasting ;-), I’ll leave you all to be envious in peace =)