I couldn't help but notice that almost your entire second to last paragraph sounds nearly identical to the current iPhones and iPod touches. Anyway, the only r

I couldn't help but notice that almost your entire second to last paragraph sounds nearly identical to the current iPhones and iPod touches. Anyway, the only reason why I keep coming back to the iPod rather than any other player in the market is because of its usability, not because of the hardware and generally not because of the design. It may not have all the bells and whistles, but it is drop dead simple to figure out how to use, partially since it doesn't have a dozen buttons just to control playback. I feel that maybe the rest of the competitors (after all, there is also iriver, cowon etc. that are willing to spend the R&D money on new designs since they are in a market (south korea) where iPods and Apple do not dominate as much) just overthink things, and underestimate the now fairly significant tie-in most people encounter if they purchased significant amounts of DRM'd media from the iTunes store. Hopefully the latter will decrease as there's growing demand for unlocked music, but the former...I have a neighbor who insisted on buying a portable CD player, and you have no idea how complicated it can get. I about wanted to give up after staring at a recent Sony one that had, like I said, a dozen buttons just for playback. She eventually caved in and got an iPod nano, which she was able to figure out without reading any manual.