You've seen the commercials, you've fought the temptation...but is the Apple iPod really worth the dough?

Let's face it: everyone and their grandmother these days has a massive mp3 collection. Sure, the RIAA may be out to convince us that downloading new music is illegal and wrong, but the truth is the cat isn't just out of the bag, it's a few miles down the road. But who wants to be stuck at their computer listening to music?

Over the past few years, there has been a tremendous amount of products out there that try to take you from that - home and car stereos that play mp3s for sure, but what has been the biggest seller of course is the portable mp3 player. Like miniature hard drives, these devices are tiny and hold massive amounts of music. And while there are many different iterations of portable players, one thing has become incredibly clear to me: there is the iPod and there is everything else.

Packaged in a black cube, the 20GB iPod is actually a lot of fun just to unpack. The box opens like two smaller cubes stacked on top of each other, opening up to two flaps that hold the various accessories and the iPod itself. It's hard to explain or even show in pictures, but there seems to be a lot of care and thought in just the packaging of the iPod itself. Anyways, once I got it out and opened, I let it charge for a bit before taking it home and setting it up.

I have to confess that I'm a recent "switcher", so the first place I went to test this was on my Powerbook. Plugging it in, the device was installed without any software - if you have OS X this will be the case, but if your on Windows then Music Match or iTunes are easy installs as well. With that taken care of, all I had to do was to find what I wanted on there. I created a few playlists right in iTunes (the iPod pops up as a device in it) and simply dragged and dropped all of my music over to it. Because the iPod works with Firewire, transfers are incredibly fast - about 900MB in 15 seconds or so. The 20 GB model holds around 5,000 songs or roughly 2 weeks worth of music. Damn that's a lot. But I was anxious to try this thing out.

With a full battery, a loaded cache of about 300 songs and the nice quality earbuds all ready to go, I turned it on. Turning on the iPod is incredibly (if almost too) easy, as the player has no actual buttons. Its smooth and contoured, with the controls functioning as touch buttons instead of actual knobs. This is a very slick feature, although they are rather sensitive. You can turn it on by accident just by brushing up against it. Luckily, this feature can be disabled. To control the volume, you use a touch wheel. This too is a little difficult to explain, other than to think about it like a trackpad on a laptop. If you run your finger to the right, it turns it up. If you run it left, it goes down. In the middle is a tappable button (ok, I sorta lied. It doesn't stick out at all like a normal button on say, a cell phone, but it technically is a button). There are 4 other touch buttons on the iPod as well: a previous track, MENU, the play/pause button and the next track.

Navigation is done with the MENU button and the center "button". Find what you want by drilling down through your playlists by artist, album, title, or composer and then listen to your hearts content. Sound quality on the included headphones is excellent, but I guess it all depends on the source quality of the mp3s you have. When your done, just go back by hitting MENU again and select something else to listen to. All and all, an incredibly simple and amazing music experience, especially considering the battery lasts for 8 hours before a charge.

So what are the downsides? Well, the cost first of all. Apple is selling the 20GB for around $399, though you might be able to get it for around $20-40 cheaper. They can sell them for such a high price because, well, people are buying, and with good cause. The 10GB costs $199 but it doesn't come with two useful features: the docking station (for easy charging) and a handy remote. You can buy these things seperately, but for about $50. So at $250, your getting about space for half of the cost of $50 more. The 20 and 40 GB versions come with the two accessories.

All and all, everything about an iPod screams cool. If you need to carry and listen to a lot of mp3s for exercise, travelling or whatever, and can afford the high price tag, you won't regret it, and I'm sure would be the envy of all your friends.