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I bought a black 80 GB iPod classic at the Apple Store in Palo Alto on Monday.

(Nelly Furtado music not included)

I spent a long time trying to decide between this, the ipod touch, and some other mp3 players. I won’t go through all the details, but the touch lost out because they had removed so many features from the iphone (no google maps, email client, etc), plus it didn’t have as much storage as I wanted.

So far the ipod has been a mixed bag. I’m still not crazy about itunes, but apple seems hell-bent on forcing me to use it. Syncing the music between my computer and ipod would be much easier if I just told it to sync everything, but I don’t want to do that. There’s enough space on the ipod, but if I were to put the portions of my collection I don’t listen to on the device, navigation would be a lot harder (since there would be more clutter to search through). On a computer where I have a search box and keyboard, this doesn’t really matter.

One thing I did like is that syncing it up with podcasts is really easy.

The screen is good enough for watching some video without being annoyed (I was skeptical at first). The range of encodings it can handle is limited, so I have to do an annoying transcoding step before putting some videos on the device, but it’s tolerable.