MY SECOND CRACK AT THE IPOD

My overnight pit stop in Hong Kong on the way home from China gave me the opportunity to buy a new iPod to replace the 30GB videop iPod I left on a Brisbane-Christchurch flight after the Indy 300 last year.

Some aircraft cleaner inherited one massive progressive rock collection when they plucked that out of the seat pocket I'd stupidly left it in. Man, I wish the iPod had a PIN you could enter to make it useless to anyone who happens to find it and feels disinclined to hand it in to Lost & Found.

Anyway, after nearly being trampled to death by Saturday morning shoppers in Hong Kong, I managed to find a retailer working out of a shoe box who seemed to deal mainly in iPods (not the Creative Zen, no one likes them in Hong Kong apparently).

It was a toss up between the 80GB iPod and the 2nd generation 8GB iPod Nano. Despite the size of my music collection requiring the capacity of the former, in order not to repeat my previous iPod folly, I'm going to keep it on my person wherever I'm away from home, and the Nano is much better suited to that.

After a bit of haggling with the guy, who had rotten teeth and stringy hair, we finally settled on a price of NZ$360 ("no souvenirs" ie: no thrown-in accessories). I accepted the offer and produced my credit card. "Aaah," said bad teeth guy, grimacing at me. "No credit cards."

So I went in search of an ATM, which are about as common as flower beds in Hong Kong's electronic district - that is, there are none. So I ended up buying the iPod Nano from a high-street retailer for $385 and saved myself the hassle.

The black iPod Nano is an impressive device. There's nothing particularly new here, compared to the first generation of Nanos, bar the 8GB flash memory capacity. I like the fact there are no moving parts, no hard drive spinning constantly, using battery life and subject to shakes and drops. It's so small that when I went through customs at Hong Kong airport I forgot to take it out of my shirt pocket and set off the metal detector. The plastic box it comes in is very clever packaging. The one thing I don't like is Apple's insistence of shipping the black Nano with white earphones. Give me a bakc set, please!

Anyway, now I have to decide which tenth of my music collection to squeeze onto it, something made more difficult by the fact that the average song length in my music collection is around 15 minutes. I get the feeling I'm going to be shuffling songs back and forward from iTunes to iPod more often with the Nano than with my first iPod...