Good Stuff

Millenium Music is offering up free iPods if you’ll ship them all of those CD’s you collected back in the 90’s. Remeber that? How silly was that?

The Archos AV 700 is the granddaddy of portable media players. It’s got a huge 7″ LCD screen, and can be had with a 40 or 100 GB hard drive. It plays more audio and video formats than almost anything out there, including MP3, WAV, protected WMA, DivX, MPEG-4, WMV, and XviD.

The Creative Zen Vision is a new portable media player, designed to improve on the previous Zen Portable Media Center in pretty much every respect. It’s smaller, at only 4.9 x 2.9 x 0.8 inches. It has a larger 30GB hard drive. To top it all off, it’s less expensive, coming in just under $400.

The Creative Zen Micro Photo is another extremely portable digital music player, designed to compete with the likes of the iPod Nano. While it doesn’t quite have the cool factor of the Nano, it’s still a pretty good looking device.

If you can live with being different (i.e. not using an iPod), the iRiver T10 is a good looking option. It will also play Microsoft WMA files, making it a good choice if you use MSN Music instead of iTunes. It’s not as teeny as the Nano, and doesn’t hold as much music, but it’s fairly inexpensive compared to the Apple alternatives.

Of course this is nothing new to you (unless of course you’ve been hanging out under a big mossy rock for the last 6 months or so), but the hottest gift this year is the iPod Nano.

I’ll just get things rolling with the most recent instant sensation from Apple, the new iPod Video. Of course the latest and greatest feature is video and photos on the sharp little 2.5 inch color screen. The new 60GB model will hold 15,000 songs, 25,000 photos, or 150 hours of video.