The world's best selling MP3 player delivers more than just music to your ears. Throw away your inhibitions and preconceptions and let's take a walk on the wild side together.

Do you know that a pod is a vessel that contains something, like the seeds of plants? How apt then, that the first generation (1G) iPod started off with a cavernous capacity of 5 GB way back in October 2001. It was certainly a vast container for thousands of songs. The latest 4G iPod released in July 2004 came in a capacity of 20GB and 40GB. You can store approximately 10,000 of 4-minute songs in the 40GB iPod. And that is probably more songs than you ever owned!

The iPod has been marketed as a MP3 player. And it is wildly successful at that too. Since its launch 3 years ago, production just could not keep up with worldwide demand. Once you open the box, you will understand why too.

The Apple designed black box splits open like a clam shell with pearly white insides. And every piece of equipment is beautifully sculpted with rounded corners and colour-coordinated (white). There is a sense that the small fortune is well spent as the whole packaging is truly a work of art, and not some expensive techno-toy thrown into a cheapskate run-of-the-mill oversized box. Apple has just sold you an experience, and not just a cool gadget.

Lesser known about the iPod is that besides storing the ubiquitous songs, you can also add text notes, contacts, and calendar of events. The adding of information is one-way, i.e. you cannot update anything from your iPod. Some people use the notes to store recipes. I thought that might be great if I'm travelling and want to refer to some quick cooking tips. However, I would not want to soil my baby in my regular Asian kitchen! However, it does open up options to put travel information handy like hotel and car reservations, tourist sights, itinerary, route information, to-do lists, and so on just as long as they are all textual. Currently I have shop contact, diving and photography tips on mine.

The iSync (free; for Mac only) and iPodSync (PC shareware) allows one to sync contacts and calendar of events automatically from the computer with the iPod. Otherwise you have to manually create an iCalender or vCalendar file for each event you want to port over to the iPod, and create a vCard for each Contact to be copied over. The software also lets you add news clips and weather forecasts to your versatile white gadget.

When you've got tens of GB of space on your music player, you've got to think big. After all, you just do not have that many songs to put into the player. Normally such players also double up as portable hard disks. The iPod comes with the fastest cables (both USB 2.0 and Firewire) currently known on planet earth to make data transfer a snap. Do you know that The Tower Towers and The Return of The King, part of the award-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, was made with the aid of iPods? When director Peter Jackson had to stay in London for 4 months to oversee the scoring of the films' music, digital dailies were transferred to his 30GB iPod in London daily so that he can review the work done and video conference with his team in New Zealand.

Other contents you can consider putting in your iPod are audio books. These are books read by professional actors and recorded into an audio format. There are times when it is not possible to read like when you are on a jerking bus, a rocking boat at sea, or cooped up in some dimly lit rooms, but you can always listen to your iPod. The entire bible, in various languages, is also available. A whole book may take up a few hundred megabytes, but that is not a problem for your spacious iPod. Now try storing all that in the limited capacity USB Flash drives!

In addition, with the right third-party accessories, you can also transfer photos from your digital camera or media reader to your iPod sans the computer, make recordings, and even turn it into a FM-broadcasting station! Kit Chan, a local celebrity, found her iPod coupled with iTrip to be indispensable, as she now has thousands of songs to play in her car. Who needs a multi-disc changer in the car any more? Besides, you can bring the iPod overseas and use it in rental cars, which usually do not come with very good accessory specifications.

This year, Duke University in the States, in a one-year pilot project, gave each freshman a 20GB iPod preloaded with freshmen orientation information and the academic calendar. Throughout the year, the students can download lectures, language lessons, audio books and music from the iTunes site with the codes given by their teachers. The university hopes to motivate students to think of creative ways to use audio content and mobile computing in their educational pursuits. The US$500,000 project certainly also made staff more interested in adding audio and video contents to their courses.

To keep boredom at bay, a couple of simple games are also included in the 3G and 4G iPods to keep your audio, visual, and tactile senses occupied. Now which other MP3 player allows you to do that? More games can be added if you search hard enough on the Net.

The sleek designer gadget is no slouch on the technology front either. The intuitive Zen-like touch-sensitive Apple Click Wheel is actually a very advanced interface. With a circle of your fingers, you can adjust the volume, rewind or advance the current track, or make various selections quickly. The SoundCheck feature (also available in iTunes ) provides consistent playback volume. This is a real boon when you have selections from so many varied sources. A 25-minute skip protection allows you to jog without fear. Those Apple earphones actually use neodymium transducer magnets for minimum distortion. The rare metal according to Apple is five times as powerful as aluminium or cobalt drivers used in cheaper earbuds. No wonder the music sounds so good coming out of the iPod!

iPod, a superlative of portable music players, is an epoch-making masterpiece that has revolutionalized the modern world, both in terms of technology trends and the English language (just look at the number of 'Pod' terms the iPod has spawned).

So, game to start Poding? If you've already done so, I'll love to know what other creative ways you have been using your iPod.

 by Lim Huey Bing