For quite a while, I was toying with the idea of buying an mp3 player. As it turned out, if you want to make an educated decision about which one to buy, you’re in trouble. To make a long story short, here is what I learned from talking to people in electronics stores and from reading online “reviews”: 1. “the harddrives in those players break within a few months anyway” (actual quote from an employee at a store); 2. mp3 players break when being dropped from heights (you wouldn’t believe the number of people who seriously complain about this in their reviews); 3. There are two vast communities of people out there whose sole reason for living seems to be to promote/trash Apple’s iPod - with about ninety percent of the discussions centered on whether iPods look “cool” or not (I personally am not too thrilled about their design, but what do I know about visual stuff?). To summarize, if you want to waste hours and hours of your time, try the internet. For extra amusement, then go to an electronics store and try to get any reasonable information out of one of the people working there.

PS: I ended up buying an mp3 player. No, it’s not an iPod.