Well, my sister had recently suggested that I start using an mp3 player when I’m working out to make the workout a bit less strenuous.  Not to mention that it would be good to keep me hype and energetic when the music blaring over the speakers at the gym really doesn’t do it for me.  Especially considering that my tastes in music differs from the typical white suburban residents that I share the gym with.

So I head up to Sam’s club and take a look around at the mp3 players.   I took a look at the iPods and wasn’t really too impressed, considering the price of the iPods themselves as well as the accessories.  It seems that anything that says “compatible with iPod” automatically goes up at least 50% in price when compared to accessories for other music products.  But then I found it….  The IPod Touch.

I have to admit, this little bugger is quite sweet.  I decided to opt for the 8 gig version and save the extra hundred bucks for some wireless Bluetooth sport headphones that would work with the IPods.  I’ve been playing with it since Sunday and so far, I love it.  Here’s what I like so far.

• No proprietary headphone jack
• Screen can be turned of while listening to music
• video podcast support
• Audio book support
• YouTube (for video surfing in the bathroom)
• Contacts (Great backup in case contacts on my phone aren’t available)
• Calendar
• Slick user interface
• Pictures

The main thing that I’m really missing on this thing is built in Bluetooth technology, and more pda type functionality.  I know it’s a music player, but with this thing sharing so much of the Iphone technology, they might as well should have had it double as a pda as well.  I’m quite sure though, that developers will start building some pretty cool applications for it so I’ll just wait and see what comes down the road.

So Ora, Chris, Jonathan, Aron, etc… I finally broke down and got an Apple product.  I’m still griping about the price of their stuff, but I’m liking it so far.   But I’m still not ditching my Quad core, Intel cpu.

For those of you who don’t know what the iPod touch is, here’s a link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj0UZjrSVLA