Where’s the fricking “Like” button?
I, being of sound, unwashed mind, hereby vote up your post.
Hasn’t that already happened? I have an old (unactivated) phone that I use as an .MP3 players. (It’s only 16G, but that’s on a micro SD card.) However, I don’t really need to use it, because my new phone holds just as much for music, too. The point is that any phone now can hold as much music as you’ll ever want in a day.
Well the Touch is really just a crippled iPhone anyway, and at least with the phone I have the option of using my 3g connection if I need it, but I connect via wifi almost all of the time anyway.
I only have 8 gigs on my phone, which is patiently ridiculious when you consider the price I’m paying for this thing subsidised over a two year phone contract. Hell, the iPad only comes in 16 and 32 gig flavors and it’s not like there’s a space limitation in there. If Apple would allow expandible memory via Micro SD like everyone else I wouldn’t mind so much about how little onboard I have, but after playing with 8 gigs for a while you realize that it’s goddamned tiny. 64gb iPhones would be great, but I’m greedy and want at least 100gb.
I just replaced my dead iPod Classic with…another iPod Classic. And that was because I need a lot of hard drive space, and out of all the iPod models, this is the only one now with over a hundred gigs. It only comes in 160 gigs now. I think my old one was 250. My biggest beef with iPods (and especially iTunes) is the “our size fits all” mentality. Apple has a vision of how their devices should be used, and if you want to do something slightly different with it, it’s nearly impossible, or at least wildly inconvenient. In my case, I download and listen to a lot of spoken word stuff - audiobooks, radio programs, podcasts, etc. In all cases, I put them on, listen to them once, and delete them. iTunes just cannot wrap its little head around that style of doing things. I’ve found workarounds, but it’s a pain.
This has gotten very rambling. I must go get a new onion on my belt.
That’s one way of looking at it. I like to think of it as a device that has the best parts of an iPhone (the player, the apps, etc.) without the worst parts of an iPhone (the phone, the phone contracts).
I love my 8gb zune and was thinking of getting something in the 80+gb range to hold more music. Oh well.
If I could put a 64gb card in my Droid, I’d might consider using that instead but the battery life on that phone is low enough without having an hour or two of music playing through it a day.
But you still have a cell phone too, which makes it so that you have to carry two different hunks of plastic around with you, that likely don’t share chargers so then those too. I’m not saying that the iPhone is a great phone, it’s frankly one of the worst cell phones I’ve ever owned in terms of call quality and overal fidelity and AT&T is basically the Comcast of the cell phone world in terms of being giant douches about everything and deciding the best way to increase profits is to just charge you more money for the same thing you already have…but it’s still a web browsing MP3 player that also makes phone calls and plays video games all in one device.
All things being equal I’m up for a new contract in July and we’ll see if I get a newer iPhone or if I go Android.
As much as I’d like to see some actual competition to the iPod, the sad reality is that you can’t (couldn’t?) get a Zune anywhere except the US and Canada. What did Microsoft think was going to happen, considering you can get iPods pretty much anywhere?
I sync’d my wife’s entire iTunes library onto her Android Incredible. She loves it, and doesn’t use her iPod Touch at all anymore. Yeah, battery life on her phone is not the greatest, but she loves the option of being able to listen to her music with or without headphones, and it’s easy to swap SD cards, which her iTouch couldn’t do. She also has an extra battery for emergencies. All in all, she’s really happy with her Incredible, and thrilled she wasn’t swayed by the iPhone hype. Of course she’s already salivating over the Android HTC Thunderbolt. 
As far as the Zune is concerned, I guess I’ve become one of those people who dismisses anything Microsoft develops; I didn’t give the Zune a second thought when they were marketing it. In fact, I thought it went the way of the dinosaurs a few months after it was originally announced.
The reason for the Zunes failure is simple. Apple creates products which are perceived as cool and fully serve the needs of your average user. To come out with a similar product (even if slightly improved) with the same pricepoint is nonsensical. You have to do better on price. Thats your only hope of breaking into the market.
The Zunes failure should be an important lesson to all the electronics companies coming out with tablet pcs.
Wow. I have no idea what the he’ll you are saying here. First you say you want a 100+ GB player but then you say you listen to most stuff once then delete. Why would you need such a large player then?
Well, he mentions that he had one that at one point was 250GB, but that the latest models only go up to 160GB. If he had enough to fill the 250GB, then he’s going to have to sync a smaller subset of what he wants to carry… and on top of that, he has to make room for podcasts and one-time stuff like audiobooks. A larger capacity means that he doesn’t have to micromanage things so often, but if he’s maxed out the capacity, he has to delete things everytime he wants to sync something new up.
I’ve kind of got the same issue-- I have about 300GB of music in iTunes, and have a sync list of ~50GB that I wish to carry with me at all times. In addition, I subscribe to 12 or so podcasts, and like listening to these on the go. Not bad so far, except I use an iPhone, and the largest model goes up to 32GB. If they made a 64GB model, I could sync everything and have room for the podcasts, and listen to things at my leisure without deleting things all the time to free up room, or micromanaging the sync list to make sure I have the music I think I’m going to want to listen to that day. Instead, I have to sync a subset of my preferred list, and listen to the podcasts quickly and delete them to make room for incoming podcasts (or even to make room for updated apps, or if I need to download a PDF, or want to have a book or something).
Well, the iPod Touch is a handy mobile internet and gaming device, that can also play music as some kind of tertiary feature. The iPhone is a shitty phone that is also a handy mobile internet and gaming device. 
I carry my iPod touch and my pre-paid cell phone because I don’t make nearly enough phone calls to justify paying as much as the phone companies would want me to, especially on a cell phone that is so poorly designed as to forget the keypad.
I download a lot of stuff on a regular basis. Every week or so, I move everything I’ve acquired onto my iPod and off my hard drive, and delete whatever I’ve listened to off the iPod in the meantime. I could, I suppose, keep it all on my hard drive until I’m about to listen to it, but that would (a) take up a lot of space on my hard drive, and (b) limit my options when I’m deciding what I want to listen to next. As I said, I use my iPod differently than most people, but I like my system.
Well, you could always buy an iPod Classic, buy a new larger laptop hard drive of the appropriate speed and interface, open the iPod, and swap the hard drives.
Anyway, for podcasts and stuff, just tell iTunes to sync unplayed podcasts. When you’re doing listening to it, delete it from the library and it will removed from the iPod automatically.