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Music is a very emotional thing for people. It’s a form of expression. So it’s no shock really that the device you play your music on is also a form of personal expression.

After I wrote my iPod envy post the weirdest thing happened (you’ll have to read to the middle before I get to the actual thing). On a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon I happily drove my car down to Costco. I was on a mission. I was coming home with a 4GB iPod Nano in Black. I’ve also been looking for an Alarm clock that didn’t suck, and it just so happened they had the iHome Clock Radio. This gizmo will ensure that my iPod is always charged, and I can listen to my podcasts from bed. It also doubles as a clock that synchronizes to the atomic clock. cool.

I know I said I would wait for the Toshiba Gigabeat S and Urge… I lied. I do not want a big 30GB player. I want impossibly small and I want it now!

I haven’t been this gadget happy in a while. I could not wait to go home and play with my new toy.

The experience of opening a nano box is unmatched. I didn’t have to break out a sledge hammer to get through some 8 inches of sealed plastic. It was simple, easy and inviting. The device itself is impossibly small (like they say). If it were any smaller it would be hard to use. I turned it on and immediately knew what to do. The navigation mode is so very simple to use. The tactile feel of the click wheel is perfect. I know that at least a dozen Apple folks AND Steve Jobs agonized for days and days about how the click wheel felt. The tiny screen is a marvel to look at and read. I love it. There weren’t any warning signs in the box that said:

“STOP! Having Trouble?”

[via Larry Osterman]

After un packaging I downloaded and installed iTunes. It’s been about 2 years since I last used iTunes. I have to say I’m very impressed. The Podcasting support is simply fantastic, and of course, the iTunes music store and built in streaming radio with such entries as KCRW (my fav radio station) are a big plus.

So, off I went to transcode all my audio. This was a simple process of dragging my Music folder on my desktop PC (with about 160GB of WMA lossless music) and dropping it onto the iTunes window. Off it went to transcode all my audio to AAC 128K. In the mean time I started to load up some songs on it and I went for a walk.

Then I went to fetch my Etymotic 6 headphones, but they were no where to be found. I usually keep them with my Philips GoGear HDD1630. I lost both of them on the way back from San Diego last week.

Was this Fate? Who knows, but I bought the Nano before I knew this. And that is the weird thing I mentioned up above.

Anyway, lemme get to my point.

I am now reunited with the iPod. I feel happy and enjoy using it. My wife is EXTREMLEY jealous so I’ll have to get her one too. I really don’t feel bad about this. You see I now had a reason to go to the Apple store rather than be a bystander. I’m part of that cult of the Mac again, but this time it’s the cult of the iPod. As I was walking to the store, I heard a bunch of people say, “lets go to the iPod store”. That’s right, they don’t even call it the Apple store.

When I entered the store I was greeted by a dizzying array of accessories for my iPod. All of them beautifully packaged and presented. Even the non-Apple accessories are made and presented as well. Apple sets a very high bar, and if you don’t meet that bar in any way, customers will not purchase the product (this is also true of Mac software).

This is the iPod Economy, the iPod Culture, the iPod Ecosystem. The realities are that my music is now unlocked and can be plugged into all sorts of cars, cases, docks, chargers, in a manner that is seamless. Since I lost my headphones I decided to treat myself to this amazing headphone + laynyard combo. I can also buy accessories in almost any store or airport in the country. Accessories made by companies that are constantly finding new ways to get me to experience my music and hand them some money for the privilege.

I can’t tell you how darn convenient this clever headphone is. I can just take my charged iPod from my iHome Clock Radio in the morning (where it will be fully charged) and throw it around my neck for the train ride. No mess of headphones with a 5 ft cable to get tangled, no place I need to park the nano. It just hangs out around my neck like an accessory. And it’s freaking cool.

The usability of the iPod has improved a great deal in the past few years. The device powers on instantly, and is very fast. There is a separate menu item for Podcasts which is convenient (as well as read/unread state) and some nifty little programs like a stop watch, world clock, and some games.

What have I learned on my quest?

Designing a good user experience across hardware and software is hard. There are very few companies which are capable of making the necessary level of investment to make something that’s arguably a work of art, but also a functional music player.

I have learned that in a commodity business, you will never find a company that will make that level of investment unless they own the entire value chain (Macintosh, XBOX, PlayStation etc).

Music is an incredibly personal thing, and people have high expectations of what that experience is like on their computer, in their hands, on the plane, in a car and everywhere in between.

If you have to think to operate a portable music device then your interface sucks. If you repeatedly make the same mistakes, press the wrong buttons, or accidentally press skip or skip to many songs when interfacing with the device then you’ve also failed.

Creating an open ecosystem where anyone can sell music or create a music business does not matter if 1) the devices that are required to play that content are hard to use, hard to charge, or require a firmware update to function correctly 2) you don’t have the content, 3) cannot interoperate with the world’s most successful portable music device.

iTunes still has a ton of problems. It doesn’t import any album art when transcoding WMA and all the little solutions I’ve found require a lot of manual intervention and baby sitting. Apple has made many improvements though. Microsoft still wins on meta data… but of course, we are a platform company.

The iPod is successful because it’s a great easy to use product. It’s also successful because it’s instantly recognizable in every respect. As a result of it’s success it’s pervasive and you can find iPod solutions for the car, home and when traveling. People buy them for the same reasons they buy sexy phones.

I sincerely hope some one figures out a way to get us out of the DRM headache whereby I am locked into a device platform. Well if Apple offers a subscription version of iTunes this problem gets bearable. I think this is one area where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs should get together and decide to make all our lives a little bit better by supporting interop between iTunes and PlaysForSure. Everyone wins (at least I think).

At the end of the day, at least I gave it a shot. I explored all the reasonable options out there. Sure I was naive at times, schizophrenic at others, but I got a lot of great experience living many different devices. It took 17 months and 22 posts to get back here.