I'd be tempted to get a PSP, but strictly for gaming. The one thing that makes me shy away from it -- and yes, I fully and readily admit that this is complete irrational -- is the fact that it was advertised for any length of time by cholo dust bunnies.
The Zune SKIPS?! My iPod has never, never, never skipped. Okay. I'm done laughing at a perfectly good little device. My iPod has never skipped, and the only time it's "frozen" for a quarter of a second when looking at the menus was when I went crazy going "click click click" really fast. It did freeze up once, but that's because I unplugged it when it said "Do Not Disconnect." Still, I can't put a custom background on the iPod. That bothers me just a bit. I think BOTH players look fragile, but a nice, hard case to protect them usually makes them look a lot better. A bare iPod is just a nasty thing to look at because it really makes you afraid to touch it. But RhinoSkin is the iPod Protection God: I'm glad your Zune is working out for ya. Good to know Microsoft can make a product that lasts a month without screwing itself to pieces. (And that's a rant at Microsoft, not their Zune).
On that note: Yes, I have read that the 360 tends to brick with unsettling frequency (as in frequency of units bricking up, not frequency for each individual unit.) I'm searching reviews of the 360 every now and then to see if "fixed" hardware has started hitting shelves; when I find reports that this has happened and/or that the bricking is no longer as prevalent, I may consider getting one. Until then, PCs do gaming just fine.
The iPod might look fragile but mine has survived drops from almost a meter up onto concrete. My old one was covered in wet mud for quite some time and still worked My Zen Touch, on the other hand, could be shot at the sun, traverse its fiery center and come out on the other side uncratched
Had my 360 for a month and no real problems with it, did have crackdown lock up..but thats a bug in the game thats going to be fixed in the next patch. (oh and the xbox supports ipods/zune now)
I had a problem with my first 360, but it was a first release version, since I got it at launch. MS fixed it for free, but it broke yet again. I bought another while I was waiting for the first one to get fixed (again), but they sent me back a brand-new one the second time around. So when I got it back, I gave it to my kid, since I'd already bought another. I'd planned on giving him one anyway, he just got it a lot sooner than expected. The new ones don't seem to have this problem, like the old ones. They changed some parts around and they don't get nearly as hot, supposedly. ------ As far as IPods skipping.. IPods with hard drives not flash drives, do skip. My brother's 30gb skips a little too often for my taste. I used it biking once and it really got on my nerves.
You've got to be really jerking that thing around... either that or you flip to random tracks all the time while jerking it around. The original 5GB ipod had 32MB of buffer so you'd have to cause continuous skipping effects for ~10 minutes to eat through all of that (unless you were playing .wav files or something). The new video ipods probably have a much larger buffer since they play video, but I'm not sure how big it is. Either way I've never had either of mine skip even when exercising.
Yeah I've gone down a mountain before on a bike with my ipod and there were no problems. (ski area in colorado that I visited when there was no snow, they open up for bikers). Where are you placing your iPod? In a pocket on your leg or something? Put it in a pocket in your shirt or backpack (if you take one), or get an armband carrier.
Phoenix has plenty of faulty mountains. They are all defectively short. Stunted mountains. (now that would be a cool name for the Superstitions!)
I'm almost -- aaaaaalmost -- thinking about getting an iPod Shuffle, but only because there isn't a Zune in that form factor, and probably won't be for quite awhile yet.
My oldest daughter actually had one for a while but someone swiped it from her at school IIRC. I also seem to recall a colleague at a teevee station in a different city than here had one in his news vehicle went I went to visit him once.
