the iPod, the world's most overrated gadget

This may be the world's favourite gadget at the moment, but it's not mine. In some ways I think it's a triumph of style over substance. For a start there was that awful battery on my mark 2 20-gig iPod. From around 6 hours the battery life had subsided to around 1 hours after two or so years of use. My wife's went from about the same to 30 minutes in an even shorter period. Thanks to iPodJuice I'm now back to full strength, but $40 or so is flashing at me on my VISA statement. Then there's the sound. To be fair, the AAC format (mpeg4) is better than most mp3s I've heard, but there is something slightly polite and drab about the overall presentation, regardless of my choice of headphones and EQ. Classical music is also too quiet, so I push it up a bit in the software and, lo and behold, it distorts! Wonderful! When the battery goes flat, which is quite often, all the settings are lost so you have to re-enter the time and date, contrast, backlighting, and so on. And then we have the dreaded silence! What's this about? Pure incompetence? Indifference? Every time the iPod encounters a new track it breaks off for a fraction of a second. Clearly it's all been designed for pop music, but for anything that plays continuously and requires track breaks, this is just bloody awful. Try listening to an act of Wagner with this infernal pause every few minutes. There's no solution other than joining up the tracks, which kind of defeats the purpose. As for iTunes, if you allow it to dominate your computer and don't tax it too much, it's good, but when you confuse it, it can go very wrong indeed. Finally, if iTunes is busy, don't expect your Pentium 4 to be up for anything else. I've seen the software taking up 98-100% of my processing power just staying awake. Opening it on a PC is also hard work: it can take the best part of a minute. I'm not running a slouch. Don't be fooled: the iPod is not all it's cracked up to be.