Man, I really wish I could justify spending that much on an iPod when I already have a perfectly good iRiver........

Ah, the California Theater. Great place for such an event. :-)

Keebler, just sell the iRiver. This iPod outstrips the iRiver in all categories-assuming it doesn't scratch like the nano.

magnets do not affect and lcd like they do a crt, and it's most likely too small to affect a hard drive in any way.

Maybe you guys can help me out with understanding one of the things that's stopping me from going w/ the iPod: I really like organizing and navigating my music in folders. I don't like iTunes and the number of restrictions and control it places over your music. I just want to copy music from my computer to my mp3 player... and organize it the way I want to. Is this possible with an iPod? ps - the issue of screen scratching really isn't much of an issue for me... I put screen protectors on pretty much anything I own that has flat glass/plastic.

Organizing your own music is cool, if you have time on your hands. But once you have over 3 or 4 thousand songs, organizing your own music can just get out of control. I currently have over 7,000 songs on my 40 gig and I could never imagine having to organize that on my own. As much as some people don't like to admit it, Apple's software is intuitive -- and that's the main reason they hold the majority of the market share today. I had an iRiver, and at that point I had 2,000 songs. One day I just had enough of wondering which music is where and what's on my iRiver and what's not -- at that point I stopped using the damn thing for about a month, then decided to just go swap it out at work with an iPod. From that day foward I'm a total iPod loyalist

"Organizing your own music is cool, if you have time on your hands. But once you have over 3 or 4 thousand songs, organizing your own music can just get out of control." Hmmm... well I'm a pretty busy person and I have over 150GB of music, but I still organize it myself. So is the answer then: no, you cannot organize your music in a folder based manner or another user definieable way on iPods?

Keebler, have you ever actually tried iTunes or an iPod? In iTunes, you have a few options. First, you can tell it to organize your music folder for you. There is no magical, proprietary database format where iTunes stores all your mp3s. It uses normal directories on your disk. It will sort songs into folders by Artist then by Album, based on the song's ID3 tags. You also have the option of keeping compilation albums in a single folder, within a "Compilations" folder, or each song within an album folder within the artist's folder. When browsing in iTunes, it similarly goes by Artist then by Album, but you have the added option of Genre, so it can go Genre > Artist > Album. With this in mind, in what possible way could you be manually organizing your files that is different? Do you have folders for artists with all songs in there, not divided by album? Is there something else I'm not thinking of? If so, fear not... just because iTunes will offer to keep your music folder organized for you, doesn't mean you have to let it. It is perfectly willing to leave your music where it is, so you can go through all that manual labor to your heart's content, if you must. Put your songs wherever you want them, then drag them into iTunes. (Just make sure to turn off the option to copy new songs to your music library folder in the preferences.) Now, on the iPod, things are different. Here, your ID3 tags are crucial, because that is how the interface on the iPod works. Everything is navigated based on its tags, and you can go by Song, Genre, Artist, Album, or Composer (with the relevant subdivisions). You also have any playlists you've set up, or just shuffle. The songs on an iPod are in hidden folders, and the folder structure should really be of no concern to you. In short, yes, you can organize your music in folders on your own. But why would you want to, when iTunes will do it for you?

I think a closer look should be taken at the video capability and battery life numbers associated with the new iPods. The new iPods hold up to 150 hours of video, and get 20 hours of battery life, but those are useless numbers that got plastered all over the news today, and everyone fell for it. What Apple didn't tell everyone is that 20 hours of battery life is if you are ONLY listening to music. Please keep reading. It takes four hours to charge the iPod, and the 60 GB only gets "up to" three hours of video play. The 20 GB iPod will play video for "up to" 2 hours. That's not much for a four hour charge. With the television episodes that are available at iTunes, that means you can watch maybe 2 on the 20GB and 3 on the 60GB. It would take 200 hours of charging on the 60GB iPod in order to play 150 hours of video. That's horrible! (4 hours x 50 charges. 50 because you get approx. 3 hours of video per charge to equal 150 hours of video) Apple has already been down the road of poor battery performance, and they did a mighty fine job of hiding it today. This is very disheartening because it seems many, many people are going to rush out and buy a new iPod with video expecting to get 20 hours of video time when this is just not the case, and I feel that the media has added to this by falling for Steve Jobs' PR antics once again.

I guess I can sort of see why people would want a video iPod, but personally I don't see any reason for it. It's just like those portable media center devices... I just don't see the appeal of being able to watch a movie or a show on a screen so small (granted, it is bigger than a normal iPod screen... But it's still small). All this is going to do is cause people to strain their eyes more. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear some report about how iPods cause eye strain in the near future... You know it's coming. ;)

I don't think anybody actually expects to get 20 hours of video playback per charge ... what do you think Apple should do, ignore the laws of physics? Are there any other devices out there that are as small as the new iPod, with as much storage, that last significantly longer? They're using a simple LiIon battery here, and it can only be so large if it's going to fit in there...

Cass, Thanks for the clarification of some of those issues. I have used iTunes and an iPod, but only briefly and certainly am in the dark when it comes to many of the ways it works. I want to organize stuff into folders on my own because the music I listen to is not easily classifiable by ID3 tags they may come with. For example I like to break music styles down into sub-categories. For example, within my "drum and bass" folder I have "liquid funk", "spacey", "hard and dark", "corny dancefloor tunes", etc etc. My iRiver (and anything that works on folders) allows me to do this easily. It also allows me to make folders for other things like, "recorded DJ sets" (from a weekly event I do), and who know what else that I come up with. Losing this would really screw up my whole system of organization. I keep my file system's folders with preceeding numbers so I can group things based on how much I listen to them and grouped by style. Additionally, there's lots of music that I've recorded from records myself which don't have ID3 tags. Does iTunes allow you to do batch ID3 tag renaming/editing? I think if there's an easy way to change the "genre" of many folderes of songs at once, then maybe I could make it work for my purposes... though I may need to add another zero to my file system method to account for the fact that I can't have sub-genres.

Well, in case anybody's still reading this thread, I just talked to somebody at work and he showed me how you can change the genre of music to whatever you'd like (including custom genres). You can select a particular artist and edit all information for that artist... So that comes pretty close to solving all the issues I have. Are there any iPod accessories that allow you to record a line-level signal?

WOOHOO!! Pan and Scan "Lost"!

The more I look at the video iPod, the more I realize it's a TV and not a movie device. The PSP will still rule when it comes to DVD-style viewing. But there is a huge market for portable TV viewing too, so I think the iPod is going to do might well.

I wish i could justify buying one. I love my ipod photo, and I realize a majority of the time I wouldn't watch videos anyway. But being able to throw a family guy episode on there or something would be really nice. If someone found a quick way to rock TiVo ToGo files to iPod video compatible files? I'd be there. Oh. And Mac compatible.

Keebler, All of the above mentioned is true, but there is one more thing. I realize this ight sound stupid to most people but i use the playlists on itunes to create a complete list of albums under the format: artist / CD name. This is a hell of a bother if you have a lot of stuff but i just find it a lot better when i want to find something to listen to and i dont know exactly what that is. Anyways, the point being that since last itunes 5.whatever you can create playlist folders, so if you want to you can create a playlist folder for each artist you got on there and then several playlists within with the different albums. It sounds like a lot of work, but sometimes its worth it.

On the ipod video, I think most of you are missing the point here. The wonder of this device in my view is something which wasnt very publicized during this whole shabang. IT HAS VIDEO OUT THROUGH RCA (NTCS & PAL) now that may not seem like a lot to you guys, but if you think about it, when do you wanna watch a movie the most, or for that matter just have something to do? When youre away form your house. Be it camping, in a hotel room or a friends house in another city, thats the big thing for me. Heck, you can hook it up to about 99% of all TV's in the world! No more boring chilean TV for me, i can bring my own stuff anyware. And who cares about battery life? I can just have it plugged in! 150 Hours of video will brighten up any arranged wedding honeymoon, and make the wakward sex a lot more bearable!

On video encoding... It think the format the ipod video uses is the same as the PSP. Theyre both MPEG4 but i think there are different codecs or subdivision within MPEG4. On the other hand the PSP video files i create with PSPVideo9 (free app) are automatically linked to quicktime on my pc and play really well on it, so this app might be a good option. It accepts as source the following formats: AVI, MPEG, WMV, VOB, Quicktime, TiVoToGo and AviSynth.

I myself wish iTunes supported additional tags, particularly for sub-genres and moods, but one work around I've used in the past for sub-genres is making custom genres in formats like "Rock:Metal," "Rock:Classic," "Electronic:House," Electronic:Trance" - stuff like that You can also put anything in comments, like "DJ Set" or "recorded live on..." - labeling DJ sets in the comments would make it easy to set up a smart playlist for them. It's definitely a pain manually typing in ID3 tags if you didn't automatically get them when ripping a CD, but it's totally worth it, especially if you have an iPod. Also, iTunes and the iPod keep track of how many times you've played a song and you can set up smart playlists based on playcount.