A few further thoughts on the iPod Shuffle. As I was leafing through the sale flyers in the Sunday paper I noticed that the standard retail prices for 512 Mb USB thumb drives is around $60 or $65, judging by the ones that were on sale with rebates. I don't already have a thumb drive and have been in the market for one if I saw one at a good price. So then the question becomes would I pay $30 or $40 over the cost of the thumb drive to have the MP3 player that integrates transparently with my iTunes? Hell yeah!

I saw a reference to my Shuffle post in this discussion. I think this dude radically misses my point by about as much as he missed my name when he says

But I got really irritated by Dave Schlesser's comments on it at

Like he couldn't have done what he wanted to do with any other MP3 player on the market up until now. And what does "optimized for not needing the display mean"?

Um, I was talking about the iPod Shuffle, that's why I didn't mention any others. Many people are saying that the Shuffle seems poor for podcasting, a small number of people think it will be fine or even good. My statement didn't say anything about the abilities of any other player. Simmer down, dude. There are indeed plenty of players that will play podcsts just fine. Now educate me - how many of them will sync transparently with my iTunes playlists that iPodderX fills up every night? I know the Shuffle will. There might be others, but unless they are also usable as thumb drives and available at the same or better price, I'm not interested in them. So please don't be pissy, just constructively tell me what the alternatives are.