The gadget freak that I am (not to mention Apple fanboy and audio enthusiast), believe it or not I only placed order for my very first iPod last week only. Anna has had her 3rd generation iPod for some time now but the storage has been pretty limited for my 240gb music library (I prefer ripping in Apple Lossless format).

I'm getting the 80gb Classic from my reward points at work so it's practically free but how I wish I did some research around the net first. Apparently it's plagued by several technical issues like slow Cover Flow response (a nice to have but not a deal breaker), audio playback skipping, and (OH NO!!) lesser audio quality compared to the previous iPod Video [aka 5.5gen] according to this test.

It's also sad to hear (no pun intended) that Apple, after reaching a level of quality and customer satisfaction has chosen to replace their Wolfson codec chips in favor of Cirrus Logic's.

Despite a recent firmware 1.0.2 update as of this writing, many of the issues seem to persist. What's the deal Cupertino?

What to do.. what to do...

-kyo-