Apple iPod 3rd Generation White (10 GB) MP3 Player

The third generation iPod is a great unit!! Many accessories, docking station for home stereo use, etc. The kicker with them is the hard drive. It's a 1.8" Toshiba hard drive and they are quirky. Some end up with a stick read arm, some won't read at all, some will read as an external hard drive, but not in the iPod. Some work fine and with that the units are great!!! They are sensitive, though... touch pads, internal hard drives, polish steel cases, and display screens make for a sensitive piece of equipment. They are great for a music data base, but not good for active events like sports. They are heavy enough to jounce around when running, biking, or skateboarding... you'd probably want an iRiver or Creative Labe MuVo for that (both are excellent units). The thing with the iPod is that the output power is strong enough to drive a home stereo, with has a minium required amount of input power through the RCAs... most portable MP3 players just don't have the 'umph' to get good sound without seriously taxing the home theaters amp. The iPod is one of the most powerful internal amps... I think they are 65mW/channel of output power. Either way, it's plenty to drive a home system or inputs on a automotive amp. I have a couple of the 3rd gen iPods and use them in their cradles as a home jukebox, or I pull on to play it in my car. The 10-20 Gig is plenty for thousands of songs... enough to drive you nuts in trying to organize!

The only other concern I can say is when uploading music to the iPod. When you upload a ton of songs at once, some of them tend to have a hard time making it through. Some of them will come through partially blank and it will play silence, but when you go to re-auto-update, the software sees that song as already there in it's entirety. You have to delete the song and reload it... kind of hard to find them all when you've got 2500 songs on your Pod.

All in all, it's one of the best players on the market... even with it's quirks.