Just to be contrarian, I decided to get an iPod working with my PC, come hell or high water. It took a couple of weeks, but it was worth the wait. Here are some thoughts from the perspective of an iPod owner with no Mac.

The 5 GB capacity puts it over the "sweet spot" where you can carry around a great selection of tunes for all occasions. Players with less than 1 GB require endless shuffling of files on and off the units. There are 20 GB players available, but how long would you have to listen to shuffle play before you heard everything? Besides, you can easily find 2 GB worth of songs for a reasonably prolific artist, so you're going to have to make *some* choices about what to leave out. Better 5 GB worth of great tunes than 20 GB of mostly subpar songs.

The casing is nice and stylish. I wish the wires on the earbud headphones weren't white though -- makes it hard to listen discreetly, unless you dress like the Man from Glad. The case seems sturdy, if prone to smudging. I got a scare when it developed what looked like scuff marks after only a day of use. The marks turned out to be some sort of residue (maybe from the plastic packaging?) that came off easily with some citrus-based solvent.

The controls are nicely spaced, nice and big, easy to work by feel while keeping eyes on the road. The scroll wheel in the middle lets you adjust volume as long as you can get a finger somewhere on the front panel. There's a nice soft click when a button is pressed or as the wheel is spun. This is the first player where the "Hold" switch had any purpose at all. On the Rio 800 or Nomad Classic, the controls were hard enough to access that they never got pressed accidentally; but I have taken the iPod out of my pocket and found it playing a song when I had forgotten to put it on "Hold".

The big wheel on the front makes it hard to imagine a case that combines easy access with good protection. I gave up on the idea of adjusting the volume while walking around, and just use a soft bag that I used to use for a camera lens.

I've had bad experiences with the user interfaces on Rio and Creative Labs products, so even when I see new models with good reviews, I'm skeptical that they'll really be convenient to operate.

Getting the iPod to work with a PC is an adventure, a little bit of a dice roll. You can get trial software ("Xplay") from www.mediafour.com, typically timing out after about a month. (The timeout date is hardcoded, so you might only get a few days use before it times out.) They seem to be getting closer to a real release, so by the time you go looking for it, the commercial version might be ready.

The biggest unknown is whether the iPod will be recognized by any given PC Firewire card. Reports on the Mediafour bulletin boards suggest certain chipsets are more likely to work than others. I was convinced by Buslink PCMCIA card wasn't compatible, because my laptop wouldn't recognize the iPod at all -- no drive letter, no hourglass icon when it was plugged in, nothing. This card uses a nonstandard connector on the PC side, so I couldn't use the Apple-supplied Firewire cable.

A powered Firewire port is supposed to work a lot more smoothly. I've just won one on eBay for about $40 including shipping, while they seem to go for about $70-80 at retail. [Added later: This did work fine after I got it, in fact it would fully charge the iPod better than when directly connected to an iMac.]

However, I did eventually get it working. The iPod can go into "manual Firewire mode" if you do a double Vulcan nerve-pinch: first the left + right buttons until the Apple logo appears, then the top + bottom buttons until the Firewire logo appears, which looks like the South Korean flag or a nuclear hazard sign. With the iPod in this mode, it was recognized when I rebooted the PC while it was plugged in. From that point, all the Xplay software worked swimmingly. Although rebooting is a pain, it isn't necessary very often since I just loaded all the songs I wanted at once. (One directory at a time, as some have reported problems coping hundreds of files at once. When a problem like this occurs, you might need to borrow a brand-new iMac to recover the iPod, so err on the side of caution here.)

The one thing I found strange with Xplay is that when a song is added to a playlist, a second copy of it appears in the list of songs. You have to drag the real file onto the playlist and it gets copied again, rather than dragging the icon from the list of songs onto the playlist, as you might expect. I suspect this means it's taking up 2x as much space.

The battery really holds its charge well. I run it for several days, commuting back and forth and then at the office, between charges. Those without a powered Firewire port can use the AC adapter, which charges through the supplied Firewire cable. The AC adapter is nice and slim, not blocking off other outlets on my power bar. [Added later: the battery does seem to be developing a memory effect -- only runs 6-7 hours now, no matter how long it's charged. To save the battery, I turn it off immediately rather than letting it "time out" and go to sleep; but this means I can't resume at the same song when it's turned back on.]

Sound-wise, it does seem better than other players I've tried. Even through a cassette adapter in the car, it gives nice sharp results that actually seem better than CD-Rs played in the car's CD player. At home, I plug it straight into some Altec Lansing ACS-45 surround-sound speakers, and it can really raise the roof.

The backlight can be adjusted to stay on for a long time, and it's nice and bright. This is important to me while driving or working out, where I can't devote my full attention to turning the backlight on every few seconds while skipping through songs. The one glitch I found here was that the backlight will time out while I'm holding down the fast-forward button.

There's something peculiar about the random play. It will often play two songs by the same artist in a row, or with one one or two other songs in between. This is very obvious when there are hundreds of songs. I believe it's a workaround to save battery life, i.e. load "nearby" songs into memory rather than seeking all over the hard drive. It seems to apply to any songs that are loaded in consecutively, as it happens when I load multiple versions of the same song.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 395