Snapping her fingers and...

I just did it. I broke down and bought the 1GB iPod Shuffle. This is the 4th MP3 player I've bought in 7 years. The very first one had 64MB storage (imagine that!), which was replaced by a free one I got in 2000 as a Christmas present for working on a consulting project at ChevronTexaco, which held 192MB. That one served me well into this year, holding about 3 hours of WMA format music.

Then I wanted more. I wanted a 20GB iPod, but it was just too expensive and you had to buy all the accessories separately. So I bought the iRiver iHP-120 which also has an FM tuner (great for watching TV at the gym) and can be used to transfer data files as well. One drawback was that I had to re-burn all my music in MP3 format so I could use the "shuffle" feature of the iRiver. So I'm still working on that, what with the 200+ CDs we own. But it's nice to have that much space and tons of music, especially for long plane flights. Unfortunately, I also discovered that brisk walking (and definitely running) with the iRiver caused all sorts of skipping, due to the moving parts of the hard drive.

I needed a flash memory-based player with no moving parts. I really thought hard about the brand spankin new iPod nano, which is a work of art.

However, it seems a bit more fragile than the Shuffle, and I don't really need the color LCD screen or the worry that I might sit on it and snap it in two. The 1GB shuffle is half the price of the 4GB nano, and I don't really need more than 500 songs anyway. That's what my iRiver is for.

So I bought the 1GB shuffle, and with the Apple student discount, it came to less than $130. It includes the lanyard thing to hang it around your neck. I'll start with that. My new toy should arrive sometime next week. Yay! Maybe by then I'll be ready to go back to the gym.