~RIO~

I was watching Discovery this afternoon and they had a program about the iPod phenom. It was pretty good, but it didn't get to the core of the thing for me. I own an iPod. In fact, I own (I should say used to own) one of the new units that has a mass of memory onboard and plays videos... it's nice, but has the same limitations as the Gen 1 iPod had... by that I mean, you still have a fragile hard drive hanging on a string that you have around your neck. I don't know about you, but that's not the best thing to go jogging with.

The folks at Apple went into the MP3 market with a product that did a great job of opening up the concept, but when the price of memory dropped a couple years ago the whole idea of using little hard drives got blown away. I learned that lesson when I had to replace a 60 gig drive when it popped out of my back pocket while jogging and self destructed on the sidewalk. Ouch! All I really wanted was to carry a pile of podcasts and audiobooks around with me that I could access during my spare time. You know... fill the time that I have been wasting driving and jogging and other stuff. I was happy with the iPod except for its fragility. So I repaired it then gave the Apple thing to my daughter and bought myself a Rio MP3 player. It has a full 20 gigs of storage onboard with no moving parts to spoil my attitude while on a jog around the lakefront on the weekend.

Besides, the earbuds provided by Rio are much cooler than the iPod's and I don't get sprained earbones after a while. Plus the Rio unit goes into a nice stretch band that puts it on my arm, a nice touch for a guy driving on I-4 and holds the dingus still to fiddle with. Plus... the whole unit costs about a fourth of the iPod. Like my daughter says... gee, Dad! You're really cheap.

Bob