The IPod is the Greatest Invention in the Past Twenty Years

When I was in high school I had a Walkman. I would stick a couple tapes in my backpack to have at the ready for moments of inspired headbanging and hope I had fresh batteries. Inevitably I would hear James Hetfield or Bruce Dickinson's voice slow down as if they had received an overdose of thorazine and the Walkman would be out of commission until I purchased new batteries.

In college I added a portable CD player to the mix. Compact discs were so much better than tapes since they didn't unravel and had better sound quality but I wasn't in love with the portability factor, or lack thereof. The round shape of the CD meant the player took up more room and the early editions of the player meant the disc skipped more than a little girl coming home after the last day of school.

Once I started working in the mid 1990s I didn't have much need for portable music players. I wasn't impressed with the current music scene at the time and couldn't listen to music at my job. Commercial radio played the same five songs in heavy rotation along with dozens of ads for strip clubs and burgers. It's hard to believe but my life was fine without a regular dose of music for several years.

Then salvation came in the form of a couple square feet of metal and nanotechnology.

The iPod allowed me to download what songs I wanted to listen to from the iTunes program and pay a dollar each for the song. When I discovered I didn't have to get the whole album just to get one song I was ecstatic. I could also preview songs for free by clicking on the song and getting a thirty-second sound bite. This feature has allowed me to discover new artists and hidden nuggets from the past. Of all the portable music players I have had over the years the iPod is the easiest to carry. My current edition, the iPod Nano, is as big as the palm of my hand and has excellent sound quality. Honestly, if it were possible to actually "love" a gadget I would declare my feelings for the iPod from the mountains.

It's Almost Perfect Except For a Couple Little Things

My colleagues at my previous job joked that my iPod was surgically attached to my ears. That might be cumbersome unless they made a portable charger that you could carry with you but I have a couple suggestions for improving the Nano.

I set it on Shuffle mode, which means that the 1100 songs I have stored are randomly played. The Nano allows the sure to shake the iPod if they want to listen to another song without having to use the click wheel to search for one. It's a great feature but if I'm listening to the iPod in the car and I make a turn, the iPod shuffles automatically if it moves more than an inch. A less sensitive shuffle would be nice.

My other suggestion concerns the apps that are available for the iPod Touch and the iPhone models. My friends who own these models rave about them, particularly the apps. I have a personal issue with those models as I hate touch screens. I would be constantly wiping fingerprints from the screen because I'm that obsessive-compulsive about fingerprints on screens. The Nano doesn't have a touch screen so that's not an issue. I would like Apple to offer apps for the Nano, though. It can play videos and has an eight gig hard drive, so memory is not an issue. Now that Mr. Jobs is back maybe he can dispatch a team to work on that. All in all, this is still the greatest invention known to man even without those feature improvements.