There comes a time in every person’s life when they face a very important crisis: where the heck am I going to store all of my mp3s? This was the grave decision facing me a few months ago and after surveying and researching my options, I decided to go the way that was most convenient and most technological: buying a portable mp3 player. Nowadays, portable mp3 players come in all shapes, sizes, and prices from the 1 gigabyte or less variety to the more sturdy and hefty priced 15 gigabyte or more permutations. Now I had a lot of mp3s lying around my hard drive so I decided to lay down a few extra bucks and purchase myself something that could store a large portion of my eclectic music collection and at the same time, be able to carry it around easily.

Enter the Apple iPod, currently touted as the most popular and best selling portable mp3 player on the market. I had heard a lot about the iPod and in fact, have a few friends who own the sibling mini-iPods which seem to be awfully omnipresent these days. With its sleek attractive design and Apple’s large marketing campaign of dancing silhouetted people, how could I go wrong? I placed my order for the 20 gigabyte iPod and was prepared to test the so-called 4 th generation iPods which were touted as having better battery life, a new wheel, and a new shuffle feature (Apple has also slashed their prices since their 4 th generation release).