About ipod and its popularity

Ipod is a widely known and extremely popular brand of portable media players (or mp3 players) that is designed and marketed by Apple Computer. Devices of this brand usually have a simple and easy to use interface designed around a central scroll wheel. This device stores media files on a built-in hard drive while some of them (ipod shuffle and nano) use flash memory.

This brand has several generation of devices (in fact 5 generations), however we are interested in the fifth generation ipod with video playback capabilities, ipod mini as the first representative of this family not long ago replaced by ipod nano, ipod nano and ipod shuffle.

The ipod can play lots of file formats including Mp3, WAV, Apple Lossless and also such video file formats as .m4v and .mp4 MPEG-4. The Microsoft Windows version of iTunes can be used to transcode regular WMA files to an ipod supported format. Copy protected WMA files cannot be played in iTunes and/or be copied to an ipod. Therefore you will be not able to play music from other online stores like Napster or BuyMusic.com. That's because ipods are incompatible with music in WMA format that you would buy from most non-Apple music download services. Apart from iTunes there are also other programs that can be used to transfer songs to the ipod.

In addition to playing music and storing music files, the ipod has limited PDA functionality and some simple games.

Apple's marketing campaigns have resulted in the ipod's reputation as a simple, easy-to-use, stylish music device that dominate on the MP3 market. However this doesn't make ipod the ideal mp3 device since it has some annoying drawbacks that should be considered before acquiring your own ipod.