Ever since it was introduced in October 2001, Apple's iPod digital music player has been the leader in its field. Its sphysical design, clean user interface and great capacity and sound have won raves from critics. The public has agreed, buying more than a million iPods. Other companies have tried to follow suit, but failed. Their products were lower priced, and some had higher value. But they were too bulky and had complicated user interfaces. Apple's sleek, white-and-silver IPod is not only the best-looking MP3 player I have seen, it's also the easiest to, if you own a Macintosh, although PC users are now able to take advantage of this nice piece of hardware. .
The IPod's 40GB hard drive lets you fit about 10 thousand 160-kbps MP3 files into a package. The IPod also works as a portable Mac hard drive; with it, you can carry not just your whole music collection in a coat pocket but also most of your critical files, if you like. The IPod's 2-inch LCD screen displays tons of information. When music is playing, you can read the song title, album, artist, duration, and volume information, plus the battery meter. And a nice set of controls lets you jump from viewing song information to enabling the contrast or sleep-timer settings, or to turning on the LCD backlight in a jiffy. The secret to the IPod's design is its wheel. The IPod's main screen lists five key menus, including play lists, artists, and songs. A thumbwheel lets you scroll up or down the list of items, and pressing the Select button in the center of the wheel advances you to the next level of menus. Pushing the Menu button above the wheel takes you back one level. Buttons to the left and right of the wheel let you jump back or ahead one song. With these simple controls, you can navigate through hundreds of songs in seconds. Listening to any song, anywhere, is nice. The IPod's unusually large 40MB hard drive keeps the music flowing no matter how hard I shook the device.
