iPod therefore i am

Just how does a cleverly designed hard disk get the reputation of being the sexiest, most iconic product this side of 2001?

THE FIRST ONE WAS shipped on November 10, 2001. By De-cember 31, 125,000 of them had been sold. On June 23, 2003, slightly more than a year-and-a-half after launch, the millionth one was bought. Six months later, on January 6, 2004, someone picked up the two millionth one. By the end of 2005, 37 million were adorning palms, pock-ets and armbands.

Madonna, Beck and No Doubt have engraved their signatures on it. U2, arguably the world8217;s biggest band, has released a special jet-black version of it. In 2004, a High Court judge in London excused himself from hearing a case againts its man-ufacturer, because, he said, he owned one and just loved it.

The 21st century is five years and four-and-a-half months old. And the iPod is quite simply the coolest, most stylish and iconic prod-uct of this young century.

And to think that it8217;s just a sleekly designed portable hard drive! No different from what you have in-side your boring office computer.

Before iPod lovers start mailing us the death threats, let8217;s quickly qualify that statement. The iPod is small, smart, handy, smaller than the aver-age PDA, and easier to care for than your sleekest mobile. It8217;s beautiful, it can store upto 15,000 songs, it can play them for you wherever you are, it can showcase upto 25,000 personal photographs, support 150 hours of videos, and lets you carry your favourite music videos and TV shows on the road. And much much more.

Every iPod opens up a user-specific cosmos for its owner. No wonder it8217;s an obsession for young India. Read these lips. Nineteen-year old Delhi-based student Prateek Rungta8217;s. 8220;How cool is my iPod? Let8217;s look at it the mathematical way. Let the coolness of any man-made thing be 8216;X8217; and the coolness of an iPod 8216;Y8217;.

As a thumb rule, the value of X shall always be less than the coolness of an iPod, Y. Now, you see, why an iPod is the ultimate gizmo? Hands down.8221; More axiomatic assertion than logic, that. But Prateek has more to say. 8220;Sure there are a million other ways to tune in to music, but it8217;s like, you can stay in a million places, and yet there8217;s nothing like home. The logic holds true for an iPod too.8221; The iPod8217;s ability to jug-gle a gargantuan amount of music and store text applications makes it a fascinating toy for everyone. And it8217;s easy to play with too. 8220;Its probably the most user-friendly device that one can ever use to shuffle some 15,000 songs in a single go,8221; beams Prateek.

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OK, so it8217;s the most stylish juke-box in history, right? No, avers Pra-teek. 8220;It isn8217;t just about carrying your entire music library. With an iPod, the party simply never ends. It has powerful features that geeks like me simply love8212;like playlists that update dynamically into simple audio books, which have the ability to resume playing, wherever I paused it the last time.

This is irrespective of whether I had hooked it on to the Internet or was listening straight from the iPod music library.8221; Then there8217;s online streaming of audio and video, radio programmes and voice files of text, such as e-books and e-novels commonly known as podcasting. 8220;Podcasting is like an online radio show. Just that you have to download the episodes over the internet. The good thing about it is that any person with a headphone and a Macintosh com-puter can start his or her own pod-casting forum, exercise his right to freedom of speech with no bounds at all,8221; says Varenya Agrawal, a first-year student at Delhi University.

Last month, Varenya posted a love poem dedicated to his iPod on his blog. Extract: Yeah I wouldn8217;t be nothing, if I didn8217;t have you to serve/ I8217;m just a punky little eyeball and a funky optic nerve/ Hey, I never told you this, sometimes I get a little blue/ I wouldn8217;t have nothing if I did-n8217;t have you/ I wouldn8217;t have nothing if I didn8217;t have my iPod8230;I love you Pod! Is this sort of stuff going to be a threat to civil society as we know it? Speak to Natasha, 24-year-old dentist. She prefers her iPod over any men. And her reasons are clear to her and anyone similarly inclined. One such had this to say in a blog post: 8220;My iPod requires little or no mainte-nance and is always there for me. When I8217;m sad, it always has a song to cheer me up. It doesn8217;t need to spend time with 8216;other boys8217;. And above all, unlike boyfriends, it can go on for eight hours at a time, without having an opinion on anything that I think or do. I cannot even think of spend-ing a single day without it.8221; That8217;s devotion for you. Is it also time to panic? copy; iPod therefore i am Just how does a cleverly designed hard disk get the reputation of being the sexiest, most iconic product this side of 2001?