Well I’ve sent away for my ipod claim. It will be interesting to see if they will redeem $50US to an australian who bought an ipod in America. I had a bit of a look around the site and didn’t see anything that excluded international purchasers so my hope is high. If I get the money I’ll probably just end up spending it on an ipod shuffle anyway as it is only redeemable in an apple store. Why get a shuffle when I already have a 40GB ipod? The shuffle is better suited to banging around on a scooter because it is flash based (no moving parts to break) and doesn’t have a screen to distract me from the road ahead. There is a school of thought that you shouldn’t listen to music when riding but I wouldn’t have it loud, just as ambience music. It would look really dodgy at the lights to be singing to myself without the cocoon of a vehicle around me. Also I wouldn’t dare do it until I’ve had a fair bit of experience on the scooter. But I won’t be giving up my 40GB just yet – it is still my player of choice.
If it takes a while to get the voucher I might ditch the shuffle idea completely and go for a video ipod. Since the iTunes store (which still doesn’t exist in Australia) has started selling music videos the rumour mill has gone in to overdrive and the ipod video is expected as soon as September. This would mean it would be released around the same time as the Playstation Portable (PSP) in Oz. Right now the PSP looks pretty cool as there are already some hacks out there for you to wirelessly web surf, read comics, watch movies as well as play games. I can’t see the ipod video doing all that but as we all know Apple is pretty good at springing surprises.
I doubt that I’d watch a big long movie on the way to work, but I can see that as PVR recorders become more prevalent there will be a market for people to watch shows they taped the night before on the way to work while using public transport. Who knows, this might make more people leave their cars at home. Even if they don’t watch the tv shows they could end up just watching Tom Cruise kill Oprah over and over again. Wicked.