I don’t buy many peripherals (no pda or mp3 players) - a much used small camera and mini voice recorder complete my digital toolkit along with my mac powerbook. I purchased recently a Mac iPod for reasons I’m still trying to figure out:

-it had a 60GB disk meaning it could now serve as the archive for an ethnographic body of work accumulated in 2002
-it was demoed in use for me at the LTER CI meeting without any reference to music functionality which previously seemed to have backgrounded other functions important for me such as calandar sync, remote mount availability on borrowed laptop, and disk archive options.
-it’s ability to make available in color selected photo archives
-the availablility of video viewing
-the value for gaining experience with alternative portable modularized functions

Some items noticed in using the iPod
-no zoom capability with photos (common on most cameras) is a severe viewing limitation
-the Mac iPod video format is ‘ipod mp4’ so a video converter application is required to transform from standard formats (quicktime (.mov), realplyer (mpg4), and windows media player (.wmv)) to the iPod mp4. Although a number of free converters are available online, to minimize number of applications on my Mac, I purchased for $30 the upgrade of QuickTime to QuickTime Pro with its built-in converter. Interesting sidenote, I was not able to purchase the QTPro key unlock at the UCSD bookstore (last copy they received and sold was more than a year ago) nor from local Apple stores.My only option was to purchase it online from the MAC store - which worked flawlessly. I have tried to keep my own online transaction sprawl to a minimum - one company - but now I’m on record with two companies (amazon and apple).

So far I have used the iPod to ask others a question from a photo, to share a photo collection, and to demo a short video. To be continued …