Monday, July 24, 2006

What's an iPod?


Whenever, wherever
we're meant to be together
I'll be there and you'll be near...


When Shakira crooned these words, she definitely wasn't referring to gadgets that would one day make music as portable as human beings. Say hello to iPods that now go with us everywhere.

'i' what...? That was my reaction when I heard about iPods for the first time. So I decided to decode the mystery surrounding iPods.
What is an iPod?

Cassettes hold 10-12 songs. Compact discs hold 16-20 songs. An iPod, depending on its memory capacity, holds at least 500 songs! Get the drift?

The iPod refers to a class of portable digital audio players designed and marketed by Apple Computers. It stores and plays music, but without the aid of cassettes or discs.

You can attach a set of headphones to your iPod and listen to music like you would listen to your Discman or Walkman. And, like your computer, this device also stores music and information.

The amount of music you store in an iPod is directly related to the memory of its hard drive or flash drive and can vary according to the model. But more on that later.

Let's get back to our definition of an iPod. In a nutshell, it's a music player that is big enough to hold your music and small enough to slip into your shirt pocket or even into a chewing gum packet!

Features

iPods are more than just music players. They have a host of features that effectively act like a portable hard drive and can store a lot of information. These include:

Music
Store and listen to music all day long or as long as your battery lasts. From 100 songs to more than 10,000 songs, the iPod's capacity varies but the fun doesn't! Connect your ear phones or head phones to the iPod and start grooving.

Podcasts
Download and listen to music from podcast directories. Podcasting is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a set of new files (usually MP3s). It allows users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files, usually free. Podcast directories are a list of songs and other radio like shows that have been uploaded on to the Iinternet which can be downloaded to your iPod and heard.

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