The iPod series has gained an incredibly loyal following over the years. With the release of the iPod Photo 60 gig, Apple has created a machine that can hold entire music collections - and more.

For those of us who remember the days of giant 128mb MP3 players, to have a 60 gig small hand-held is just amazing. It is barely the size of a pack of cigarettes. The case is white plastic on the front and SHINY silver metal on the back, which will scratch in about .2 seconds unless you're careful. Be sure to buy a protector immediately.

Exercise enthusiasts will note that there ARE moving parts inside here - you can feel it buzz slightly when you do some file operations. It is more akin to a CD player than to a radio. If you are riding an exercise bike, this will be no problem. If you're jogging, that's another issue entirely. Active people should stick with flash memory style systems with no moving parts. Of course the funny part of this is that the commercials all show iPod users dancing around like maniacs.

You might wonder just how you could fill up 60 gig of space legally. Being a musician and friends of many musicians, I of course HIGHLY encourage you to pay for all of your music. It's only 99 cents a song - and you are helping to keep musicians fed and promoted. In any case, the iPod makes it easy to store what you've got. I can get about 3,000 songs in 10 gig. For a youngster just getting started in the work world, this might be a high achievement in CD ownership. But for most adults that I know, especially adults in a relationship, it is easy to have 300+ CDs in the house. You collect them over the years, as your musical interests change and new bands come out. This iPod finally lets you put all your music in one place and hit SHUFFLE. It is really cool to play music for days and days and have it all be different.

The photo aspect is really neat, too. The screen is 220 x 176 which gives you a nice resolution for most photos. There are hundreds of applications for this. You can carry photos of family and friends. You can carry photos of birds for birdwatching. You can carry trip photos. You can carry poison ivy identification photos when you camp. True, a very detailed image (say a class photo with 500 people in it) is going to be too tiny to see. But a nice well-done photo (say a Titmouse on a branch) will be perfect for your needs.

The interface is really easy to use and needs no manual. You slide up and down to choose an item, and click to accept it. There's a clock, calendar, contact manager, and fun games. I really like the 'music quiz' where it plays a snippet of one of your songs and makes you guess which one it is. Since you obviously loaded all the songs onto your iPod you would think this would be easy - but if you have a large library, it can be amazingly hard!

Best of all, recent price drops have made this all-around favorite surprisingly affordable. If you've got a decently sized collection of CDs, and some photos you'd love to carry with you, I highly recommend this device. It's well worth the price.

Buy the iPod Photo 60 gig from Amazon.com