Dear The Internet,
Recently, my super awesome girlfriend bought me a brand spanking new iPod Nano (6th generation). This means that with a very heavy heart, I will stop using my very heavy Creative NOMAD Jukebox Zen Xtra. Yes, that is its actual name and yes, that is actually ridiculous. I thought it would be fun to do a head to head battle between the two. A young and spry David verses a senile and overweight Goliath.
So, I’m going to start with the Creative NOMAD Jukebox Zen Xtra, which I have come to lovingly call the Music Brick. I got the Music Brick for Christmas my freshman year of college in 2003. At the time, iPods had just become PC compatible and while they were extremely popular, they were also plagued with a lot of problems. iTunes was terrible on Windows, the batteries were prone to dieing pretty quickly, they only used Firewire and they were crazy expensive if you wanted to get a 20gb one. Also, I was pretty anti-Apple at the time (in case you couldn’t tell by my breadth of knowledge of flaws in 8-year-old Apple products).
The Music Brick was pretty reasonable at the time. The software wasn’t the best (okay, it was borderline unusable), but the battery life was good and it gave you 40 gigs of storage for $200. This thing could hold all of my totally legally acquired music with a good 20 gigs to spare. The size, while enormous now, was comparable to the iPods of the time. All in all, it wasn’t a bad purchase considering what else was out there.
It lasted too. I used the Music Brick daily for 7 years before I got the iPod. I defy you to find a usable 1st or 2nd generation iPod. The Music Brick has started to show signs of its age lately (randomly shutting down, freezing, and other odd behavior), but it has been pretty reliable most of the time. The biggest problem is the software. A few years in, Creative issued a new firmware upgrade that allowed Windows to recognize the Music Brick as an external drive. This was way better than the included software, but managing 30 gigs of music in Windows can be about as fun as ironing.
As I’ve said before, I get weirdly attached to things, so I was a little hesitant when I first got the iPod Nano (or, as I have come to call it, the Music Pebble) but this dissipated pretty quickly. The biggest difference between the Pebble and Brick is clearly the size. While the Pebble only has 16gigs to the Brick’s 40, the reduced size is absolutely worth it. In retrospect, it seems pretty silly that I was lugging around this handful for so long. The build quality is also far superior. While the Pebble is made from a solid piece of aluminum and doesn’t allow access to the battery, the Music Brick grants access to the innards via this terrible hinge that is nearly impossible to get back together on the first try.
Also, the Pebble’s UI is fantastic. One thing I love that many would probably dismiss is how it separates podcasts into their own little icon and tells you which ones you haven’t listened to yet. I was worried that the tiny touch screen wouldn’t be adequate for browsing my music, but it works perfectly. The one thing that the Music Brick had that the Pebble is lacking is the ability to make playlists on the fly. The Music Brick allowed you to play a song and then add another song to play after that. With the Pebble, you can only make playlists through iTunes. It was a convenience that I didn’t realize wasn’t standard. Also, I was already using iTunes to manage my music and podcasts so it was a breeze to add and remove music to this little guy.
In general, the Pebble is exactly what I want right now. It’s small, discrete, and easy to use; it’s the perfect companion for my morning bus ride and boring days at work. I still have the Music Brick stashed away some place, but I don’t really see myself using it any time soon. I guess I could use it as a bludgeoning weapon in the zombie war or to crack walnuts, but I think a zombie attack is just as likely as me wanting to eat shelled walnuts. I’ll probably throw it in the basket that contains all of my other electronics that I’ve had for so long that they are simultaneously too out of date to use and too loaded with my emotional attachment to get rid of.
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