10gb

From a design perspective, Apple did everything right with the original iPod. Thankfully, it didn't make any changes to the cosmetics with this version. When you open the box, the first thing that you notice (after the multilingual sticker urging you not to steal music) is the casing, which is made of shiny stainless steel on the back and a thick slab of Lucite on the front. A large screen enables you to easily view the device's straightforward menu structure, and songs categorized by playlist, album, or artist are all easy to find. We particularly appreciated the scroll wheel on the front of the iPod that allows you to effortlessly navigate through the menus. When holding the 185gm device in one hand, you can click through every song, album, or playlist very rapidly.

Unlike other jog dials or button navigation systems, the scroll wheel accelerates as you turn it, allowing for the kind of maneuvering that's necessary to get through 10GB worth of MP3s (about 2,000 songs encoded at a bit rate of 160Kbps) in mere seconds. The iPod's sonics are quite good, producing clean sound through decent earbuds and featuring no fewer than 31 EQ settings, thanks to new the new firmware. As noted, the equalization feature was absent in the 5GB version.

One problem that we wish Apple would address in its next firmware upgrade is the lack of a Resume feature. When listening to audiobooks, we had to scroll all the way through the long recording to find where we'd left off. As of right now, the iPod resumes only between songs.

But in all of our testing, the iPod never missed a beat because it plays tunes from a skip-free flash-memory buffer that relays music from the hard drive. Still, if you want something specifically for jogging, you might be better off with a lighter flash-based MP3 player, which doesn't have moving parts. No one knows the effects that jogging has on hard drive-based players as of yet.