Well guys, here I am fulfilling my consumer duty and providing you with my musings on the very latest word in cool – the iPod mini. iPod’s baby sibling is just about to hit UK shores and I’m pretty confident it’s destined to be even more popular than it’s predecessor. But first, for those of you who either detest technology with a passion, or simply live in a bubble, what is an iPod mini?

Of course, the real question here is: why? What makes iPod, with it’s sleek design and, quite frankly, obscenely large storage capacity, so much better than – and worth so much more money than - other mp3 players?

Another great advantage of the iPod mini is its technical designs. One player can hold almost 4GB of music – that’s 1000 songs of four minutes each. This is only a fraction of the capacity of one of the larger iPods, which can hold up to 10 000 songs, but to be honest this doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard 10 000 songs in my lifetime! The piece de resistance, though, of all iPods, is without doubt the ‘Innovative Click Wheel.’ Instead of repeatedly pressing buttons to scroll through songs - no mean feat with 1000 of them to get through – simply rest your thumb on the touch sensitive wheel and move it clockwise to scroll downwards and anti-clockwise to scroll back up. This is extremely novel for a few weeks, and everyone loves trying it out! It also makes the iPod extremely easy to use, along with extensive menus and options, and clear instruction booklets. Sound quality is fantastic – songs downloaded from CD are at the same quality whilst those downloaded from the internet can be just as good, although this depends on the source quality.

Included with the iPod mini are the earbuds, with two sets of sterile foam coverings, a charger, all the appropriate leads for connecting to the computer, a charger, and the iTunes software, which is used for organizing all your music on your computer and transferring it to your iPod mini. This is done on an automatic basis – as soon as you connect the iPod mini to the PC it senses that it is there – although this sometimes takes a few minutes – and synchronises all playlists and makes all necessary updates on the iPod. Creating playlists is a doddle either on the iPod itself or on the computer. It keeps record of the songs you have played most recently, the songs you play the most, and the ones you rate highest, and you can also quickly create your own playlists by selecting songs, albums or artists and adding them to the ‘on-the-go’ playlist. When listening you can listen to the songs in order, shuffled, or repeated. This applies to both the iPod mini and iTunes on the PC, which replaces Windows media player or whatever other player you currently use. When transferring a CD onto your computer, nine times out of ten iTunes will be able to automatically name the songs, artists and the album, so you don’t have to mess about renaming tracks.

Price here is a clear disadvantage. It looks as if these will retail in the UK for £200 to £250. This is a lot for an mp3 player, and you really are paying for the design and the large capacity, but most of all the status of owning an iPod. It is, for the most part, an extremely high quality music player, but for all except the most die-hard music fans, there are perfectly reasonable players on the market for under £100. This really is an image thing! I purchased mine on eBay, from America where they have been available for about four months. I paid a few pence over £200 in all, including postage and packaging.

These, however, are the only problems I have noticed, and I have owned my iPod mini for nearly four months now.