You can tell many teens and early 20’s have posted here. For those of us who lived through the Walkman, or even Discman era (remember carrying your library of CDs or cassettes and the AAs you chewed through), the you can only watch a video at home or at the theater and video games were only available at home or at the arcade, to have all this capability in such a little device is quite amazing…not withstanding the #!&@ video out lock on the iPod Classic.

I, like another poster above, also live in Toronto and I can’t believe the number of FM radio stations that the iPod can pick up. It actually rivals other audio equipment I own that have FM tuners and in such a small package to boot. Yes FM is basically dead when you have thousands of songs at your fingertips, but when you are looking for new tracks and you have already raided your kids and wifes MP3 collections, FM on the iPod to find new songs to download is convenient.

To those that claim FM is dead–it might be *to you* but keep in mind most cars, clock radios and receivers still sell with radios built in. FM may seem arcane in this age of digital this-n-that, but it is so widespread and manufacturing is so cheap that it is a stretch to claim it will be dead in–oh–10 to 20 years or less. The sound quality is not bad enough for most users to motivate a widespread replacement with digital radio. (Remember that the costs to broadcasters to switch over wholesale would be tremendous in terms of licensing and infrastructure, and could only be justified if there already exists a large user base.) Actually I’ve heard a few satellite radios recently, and they sound more like a badly encoded MP3s–a clear FM station sounded better. The ongoing cost of Sirius/XM is not much but it is enough to be annoying. And it is not ideal for local interest stuff. It only seems to be worth it if you drive long distances often or you happen to live in the remote areas of the mid-West where there is little on other than a few AM stations.

Speaking of which, I wish this thing had an AM receiver so I could listen to sports broadcasts. I suspect the necessary circuits cannot be miniaturized small enough to fit in these devices. And the interference from harddrive and processor would probably screw up AM reception anyway.

Having said all that, this particular FM radio is not cheap but it is not unlike other similar devices. And for anyone who can afford the luxury of an iPod, it is not totally unreasonable.