Wow. ok I got a shuffle. Knew it would be small, but I didn't know it would be THIS small. Wow. It's awsome.

Just loaded it up with 500 MB of rock goodness, heading off to work in a half hour to give it a good old test.
How long does the battery life on these things usually last?

Anyways my anti mp3 playerness is completely gone, I love this thing. Just thought I'd let ya all know

No display makes shuffle something I don't want.

I love my min though.

But I'm a cheap person who hates things in his pockets. So less than a hundred and really small = only option. I always put my playlist on shuffle, so no loss here. And I know all the names of the songs I listen to, so a display wouldn't do me any benefit either.

The mini incredibly small and light. When it's in my pocket, I don't even notice.

iRiver ftw!

Hopefully I'll be getting an ifp795 soon.

I've got the 20gb 4th generation iPod, and I can't get enough of it...honestly, it's the greatest device ever. I mean, the ease of use, the storage capability, the design, iTunes, that awesome clickwheel... And I never even liked Apple..till I bought this.

Each to his own I guess Vinny. I see no reason to spend the extra for the mini. Shuffles plays music for me. That's all that matters

Shuffles are great for situations where you don't really want a player with mechanical parts (running for example). With only 512 MB worth of music, I see no need for an LCD to eat away at the battery life. Not to mention it'd have to be tiny and pretty clunky.

Good for you.

Can't you run with a mini or an iPod? Or does it mess up the hard drive?

It's not exactly a smart thing to do anything that's going to put a lot of stress on a hard drive... The jolt of running's a lot harder on it than just simply holding it steady while walking.

Modern hard drives are a lot more robust than people think. Those mini drives are probably even more robust since they're designed to be.

I just popped up the iRiver site for the first time in a while, and wow, they've got some good stuff. I didn't know they had many decent players that supported OGG/Vorbis. The iFP-999 is especially attractive. I wonder if the digital FM tuner is any good. Can't be that bad, and I don't know of any other micro players that have all those features.

Can you put your own flash cards into the iRivers? I wouldn't mind upping to 2 GB of storage or something, even though 1 GB is probably enough for me.

That's one of its main design functions (espec. the mini), a lot of people use them in gyms and when running.

Jim would be the expert here, as he owns one. Him or Buck.

But I don't think you can use flash cards.

it's not a good idea to exercise with a HD player... and i can guarantee apple never intended the mini to be used in a gym

flash based players however are perfect for exercise due to a lack of moving parts

and no you can't expand the memory on an iriver you can with some RCA and Rio players though

Yeah, I figured. The iFP-999 looks awesome...MSRP is $299, street price I've found for around $185! Too bad I'm broke and working on upgrading my home rig first.

I found two things about running on the iPod Mini site:




So I'm guessing it can withstand it pretty well.

It can. The average user is more likely to bust the headphone jack by putting too much stress on it than they are to give a big enough jolt to damage the hard drive.

i really have no desire for such a device, nor a need, cd's work fine for me

It's not going to break it in any short-term instance, but it's going to shorten it's overall life. There's no way to get around it.

Whenever a big jolt hits the hard drive while it's being accessed, it may not do enough to really affect it that one time, but multiply that over every day for months and it's going to put a lot more wear on it than normal use would. Typically an iPod's going to access the hard drive about once every 30 minutes or so (with 128 kbps tracks, ramp it up to lossless and you're going into more like once every couple of minutes). That's when it's most vulnerable, and after months of a lot of jolting while it's being accessed, it's a lot more likely to fail.

Not saying you can't do it with it (hell, I mow the lawn with my mini, which is probably worse), but it's not going to have the same durability as a flash player in the long run.

Of course not. But it's more likely you'll upgrade to the next generation of trendwhore iPodism long before that fails.

Yeah, don't buy an iPod! Fight the machine!

I run with my 20 GB iPod Photo every day.

usually when i say it it sounds more like "there are better players in the same price range"

not that i have any major problems with ipods it's just their issues with low impedance headphones (which is why if you own one it's a good idea to look into something like a pocketdock and a portable amp)

but you still can't get past the fact that alot of people can't understand the difference between audio device and fashion accessory

Have an iPod Mini and love it. Running, walking, etc. isn't a problem at all for me...go figure.
I have way too much music for a Shuffle- I've used all but about 250kb of my 4GB. But, if you update its music every day, or don't tire very easily, good for you. (And for saving a hundred bucks. $.$)

lol guys... i just converted my 40gb iRiver into a 40gb ipod shuffle!

Too bad that's ugly.

As compared to a white stick with buttons.

you can say a lot of things about Apple products but 'ugly' isn't one of them

Yeah, I am enjoying my shuffle. It's been a few months now, absolutely great for the gym. While running with my 3rd Gen wasn't the worst experience in the world, the shuffle is just better for that sort of activity. The no screen doesn't bug me, as I know my music collection well enough to recognize any song within the first few seconds. And as well, the 3rd Gen is still going strong a year on. Battery life is still around 7 hours, which makes me a happy camper.

..ugly? i think it's badass. compared to your sometimes color coordinated... thing.. that looks more like a certain feminine product rather than a mobile audio device. i like watching music videos on my iriver, too. and if i ever have to... the way that it acts as an external hard drive makes it simple to back up my computer really fast. no need for itunes either. pretty sure i can run programs off it if it's plugged in to my usb as well. it's got a very good internal recorder (is the ipod's a seperate device?) and an internal tuner as well..

oh and i have had friends who say that if you plug in your ipod to a different kind of computer.. like if its formatted for mac and you try a pc it will erase everything off it? sounds like fun.

Your friends are stupid

The iPod can easily be enabled to be a portable drag and drop HD. All you have to do is go into iTunes, and select "Disk Drive" Mode, or something closely resembling that. So yes, techincally, you need to install iTunes on one computer to enable that.

The thing about the Mac / Windows compatability is mostly wrong too. In order for the iPod to be seen on both Mac and Windows computers, it needs to be formatted in FAT32. Otherwise, if you plug a HFS3 (what a "Mac" specific iPod is formatted in), Windows just won't recognize it. It won't erase anything. It just won't look at it

Thirdly, I don't know how you can stand watching videos on a screen that is 2 inches wide at a very low FPS. The resolution must be terrible (even with cartoons it looks awful, and I've played with the H320). Also, the overall layout of the iPod menu scheme is MUCH better than than the iRivers. While the menu is pretty easy to figure out if you have a pulse, it doesn't have the ease of the iPod (see: logarithmic scroll wheel). Also, a personal gripe of the H320; it's just too damn clunky and the buttons are meh. I much preferred the H120's joystick to it.

The one thing that you are right about are the tuner and the recorder. While the tuner I could hardly care for, one thing I did love about my H120 before it kicked the bucket was the internal recorder. You can still get one for the iPod (pretty cheaply off ebay too), but yeah, costs money.

I love all the blind Apple hate that has to be brought onto a thread for no reason because some people have complexes about other people owning things they don't like...

I've used iPods and I've used iRivers and I much prefer my iPod. Not to mention it was much cheaper than the comparably sized iRiver.

I predict 2 or 3 pages.

however you can't use this mode for putting music on the player

This thread needs less whining and more fawning over MacOS X.

The modern Apple look is sleek and attractive, but I much prefer sleek and attractive blacks, grays and gunmetal colors. That's just what I like. Feels more like a functioning weapon and less like a fashion gizmo.

Personally i like the design aeshtetics of just about everything that's come out of Apple. What i don't like is OSX's compatibility issues (even though they've eased up quite a bit over the years), the layout of OSX (ok, i'm used to a heavily tweaked Windows interface, but that's me), and the price for just about everything they've ever made.

I wish i still had a G3 20GB (thing was nice, but got lost somewhere). Ah well. At least i've replaced it with an iPod Photo 30gb (with a 3-year service plan, i don't have to worry about the HDD, backlight or Battery).

Still though, few things can beat the design of the B&O player and earbuds (you can find the earbuds on the iPod US website).

You can enable Disk Mode manually, so you don't even need iTunes for that. I'm not sure if you can still get it to play music though.

And I think I'm going to paint my iPod black.

If I remember correctly, there's a program somewhere that builds the song database on the iPod that iTunes would normally build and allows you to just drag files over...

Of course really it's just easier to drag them over in iTunes anyway... And since I use it for playing, sharing over LAN, and ripping anyway...