I finally took the plunge and got a new iPod a couple days ago. My old Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 served me well (and still works great), but it was time to upgrade so I could use all the neat iTunes features. Plus, Mariko is always saying how dasai my old mp3 player is. The Nomad will continue to be used for home stereo use since it has dedicated Line-out jacks for great sound quality, so Mariko is not rid of it yet!

Now, on to the new toy… It’s a black 30GB iPod, with video capability. I was at the store looking for the new 1GB iPod Nano, but the video features of the bigger iPod were amazing! The screen looks great, and the video playback is smooth. I was watching Kung Fu Hustle last night, and was able to read the subtitles easily. To bring it all together, you need to use iTunes, which is great. It’s very easy to keep track of podcast subscriptions and sync them to the iPod. I gotta admit that the combination of iTunes and iPod is really powerful. It’s all organized so neatly, although the photo implemenation is not quite there yet. But, it is light years ahead of anything that Microsoft has. I still have not scratched the surface of playlists and smart playlists yet, but luckily I have my friends Mikey and Chris to ask about anything iPod/iTunes related!

Now I am thinking about using the computer to hold lots of tv shows, which my friend Chris is already doing. I also want to try hooking my laptop to the tv, since the laptop has an s-video out. Then I can play anything that we have in our iTunes library and/or hard disk on the tv. It’s great since we are using a wireless network, because things become so portable. Wireless iPod connectivity would be next, I suppose.