There is much more, which could have been reviewed. There are other brands of players, running half the price, but other thumbdrives are close in price. In particular, Sandisk has a display, but despite this, has 15 hour battery life as opposed to iPod's 12 hours. It is easier to use the iPod shuffle for file storage, than the regular iPods, but hacks exist for the iPods. You must use iTunes to synch music to the iPod (shuffle) from your computer. Note that, for files, iTunes works just like any other thumb/pen drive. iTunes requires its own review, but, after a few generations, is easy enough to get started, and is reasonable about features and bloat. It does take a little time to master. I understand some hackers are working on cloning iTunes for Linux/BSD/etc. and it apparently does work under CrossOver for Linux. The device size is large, almost the size of a butane cigarette lighter, which requires you to buy an USB extension cable for some HP/Compaqs, which put the USB port too close to the SVGA port. It also won't work in the front USB port on Dells; it feels like it doesn't seat all the way in. Dell's back USB ports work, however. GOOD: Apple has the best customer service in the industry. Apple's trademark handheld should remain stylish, until everyone realizes that white just shows the dirt faster. iTunes, with its web experience does add value to iPod over its competitors. Its light weight, and no moving parts make it great for runners. Just keep the volume low, so you can hear any attackers creeping from behind ;) iPod uses industry standard XML, filesystem storage, and will generally keep songs unchanged, stored in original format, such as mp3. Microsoft's proprietary WMA format gets converted, however. BAD: The rechargeable battery cannot be replaced. Cost of servicing this means that your iPod will just be a thumb drive in 3-5 years, when standard drive sizes will be 8Gig or larger (big enough for 2 DVD images!) You can shell out $30US for an AC adapter, but don't bother trying to play music, while the iPod is powered off your USB port (where it recharges). Its braindead embedded software turns off audio, as soon as you plug it in. The headphones have lousy strain relief in the earpieces; plan on quickly shelling out more money for some other brand, with quality headphones. I chose the 1 Gig, instead of the 512Meg shuffle, so I can download ~700M Knoppix CD ISO images where I have fast internet access, then take them home, where I can burn them as CDs. Perhaps it is possible to boot Knoppix off your thumb drive? Finally, the 65 songs, or ~29 hours of music sounds like much, but you'll find that you'd rather not keep swapping out songs. Apple won't support superior(?), open, OGG/Vorbis format, nor the encrypted DRM version of WMA. It does have its own DRM format, and supports a few other mpeg variants. DRM is annoying, as it is tracked by using info from the computer you synch from, not from the iPod. Consider if you load songs from work, take them home, copy them to your home computer. Now, you'll want to resynch these files back from your home computer to your iPod again, as iTunes on your home computer will complain that it can't recognize your iPod, and must overwrite it. The only problem is that all your legitimately purchased music won't work. It does not matter that this is the same iPod, with the same songs. You must now 'authorize' your home computer. Apple does allow you to open up 5 computers to this spyware-like authorization process. Just be sure to ask your boss for a few minutes to de-authorize your computer, or tell the repair shop, that as soon as they recover your broken computer, to run iTunes on it, so that you can de-authorize. Weiqi, I'm happy for your new iPod purchase, but you need a good more dose of cynicism, and a little more time and experience, before writing reviews!

All MP3 players have shuffle.