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iPods? Nahhhhh

Ever since the pod hit the market, it had created a big industry of other wannabe players. Agreed that Apple's iPod is not the first of its kind, but the quality and simplicity the product made the world sit up and notice.

As with most of us, I had also been tempted to get a pod of my own, but somehow been unable to justify the need for a music device, at least while at India.

Unless you are jogging during the mornings or commute using a public transport, I do not see a big reason to use an iPod. If you have your own 4 wheel transport (My opinion is, it is unsafe to listen to music on a two wheeler), chances are, they have a port to read in from your music device. But, do you need an expensive music player for that? With the advent of mass storage devices, high capacity flash pen drives, all you need is a medium for storage, not a music player. I just saw at a computer shop at Spencers, creative mass storage harddisks with the capacity of 120+GB (great for lossless FLAC format music files anyone? Hmm... This looks like a good idea for my next article...) available for picking.

While in office, you have your trusty high performance desktop or your laptop to host your music. I'm sure you are not going to listen to music as you walk to your cafeteria. So a desktop or a laptop would do.

The one advantage that I see is, you always carry your cellphone. So, if your music player and your camera and your phone and your PDA and your computer are bundled into one, I would probably take a look as it does not increase the number of devices and dangling pairs of earphones that I have to carry.

Perhaps the deal by AirTel and Vodafone with Apple would allow the availablility of the iPhone into India. I would wait a year or two for the prices to come down to own one.

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