I agree Apple has set the trend. Admittedly most of these players are just glorified hard drives, but I think healthy competition is good competition. I hope the promised iPod phone changes the market and makes us jump forward in trying to catch up with Japan.

I think the missing word here is Cool!

The Apple is cool and that’s what kids want. No self repecting teenager would be seen without anything other than an iPod. That’s the real factor here.

I totally agree with Jason.
The 5G iPod is a way for Apple to experiment with this market, which is very small at the moment. By adding video as an ‘extra’, Apple gets to vastly expand the potential market in the same way as they did with podcasts.
Taking a step back, think about what a new company would need to do to expand the portable video device market. They would need to (a) sell a device at a cheap enough price point to a lot of consumers, and (b) offer a way of getting content onto it quickly and cheaply. At the moment, there are no devices that are cheap enough and good enough at (a) to sell in large quantities. From the limited number of Archos devices that have been sold, it is also true to deduce that most consumers do not seem interested in a device that can record content from TV (at least for the moment).
The Apple strategy means that they can introduce a large market segment to video, and entice them to buy TV content. If they prove successful, they will have simultaneously grown a new, potentially very large and lucrative, market at the same time as locking these same consumers into their proprietary FairPlay DRM.

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The new iPod isn’t really a true PMP like the Zen Vision, it’s a music player with pretty average video capabilities added on, it’s purpose is to test the market so Apple can decide whether or not to come out with a true PMP later. The new 30GB iPod will only support H.264 & MPEG4 playback with limited resolution (I believe 480×480 for MPEG4 and 320×240 with H264), with less than 2 hours of battery life playing video. This makes it useful for people who mainly want to listen to music and just want to be able to occasionaly watch a video they downloaded from iTunes. If you want a video player, to play TV shows you recorded, movies you download (usually illegally), or DVD s you ripped, you’d want an actual video player like the Zen Vision or Archos AV500, which play back DIVX & XVID (common codecs when ripping DVDs) and have larger screens. The AV500 also has the added feature of being a portable video recorder, so you could record directly from TV into the device, of course this comes with a higher price tag. To the people talking about laptops, the point of these portable players is to have something you can carry around in your pocket, of course not everyone has a need for them, but you can’t really compare them to a laptop.

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I went to dinner at some friends, I wanted to show them some photos I took today and some videos I shot and edited on my vacation. I took along my Apple Mac Powerbook. The screen was much better that either of the two screens you mentioned, and there was no need to “Sync Up” with an inferior remote device like the Creative Zen. At $999 (”reconditioned”) with the ability to attach to a remote DVD burner that I already own, I consider the Apple Powerbook to be a superior value to the two devices you mentioned in your review. (And, the Powerbook battery is not “stuck inside,” it can be replaced at any time, not that I have yet had occasion to do so)

$2 for a low-quality version of a TV show you missed last night is worth it when it’s awkward to borrow and return a bad VHS copy from a friend (and maybe cheaper than the gas there and back), and it’s way less hassle than downloading an unreliable torrent for most people. That’s why the iPod will win, even though the Zen and PSP are technically better devices for playback.

Plus it’s still an iPod, and (other than no more FireWire syncing and slightly shorter battery life), is better than the previous hot-selling models for the same money. QED.

Phil: I, an Apple computer fan, bought an iPod mini a couple of months ago. I didn’t find the interface immediately intuitive, and had to consult the manual (which I had already packed away back in the box, not expecting to need it) in order to learn how to do basic functions like volume control and turning the device off.

Once I learned these things, it’s pretty easy to use, but I concur that it wasn’t as obvious as you might think it would be.

My son has an Ipod with the wheel & four buttons (about two years old). I have to confess that I don’t know how to operate it. But it came with a cable that has a pause/play and volume controls on it, I think it is a standard apple part that was included then.

I do know how to operate that part, so controlling the volume is no problem.

I’m still holding out for FM radio included, so I can get my public radio fix on my motorcycle. But I’m starting to think a Nano would be nice, with my old FM walkman for radio. Or maybe a few more shows will offer podcasts/free archives, then I can skip the FM completely.