In the last year, one thing that has caught a strong hold in the technology industry is the iPod MP3 player from Apple.  A nifty little device, most are familiar with it by now - a little rectangular hard-drive based MP3 player with a neat little screen and organizer.  I consider 2005 to be the year of the iPod.

I’ve had an MP3 player for 4 years, back when 64 MB was a lot of flash memory.  I paid $80 for it, and for the last four years, it has held everything I’ve needed.  I always had friends come up and ask me what in the world it was, because they had never seen anything like it before.  Now recently, with all the fuss about how awesome iPod are, I see something that many people do not: it’s called popularity choice.  When your friend gets something new and awesome, you want the same exact thing.  Then your friend sees you with it, and he decides to go get one.  Pretty soon, everyone has an iPod!

This causes the friend to go to CompUSA or Best Buy and say, “Hey, I want an iPod!” without doing any forethought into what they were getting.  Now, don’t get me wrong, iPod are rock solid hardware and darn well made, but I see competitors out there–Creative, for example, who have the same exact features for a LOT less money.  I’ve seen different brand names, that have more space, more cool features, and are still cheaper than an iPod, and friends will go against my recommendation and get the iPod anyway.

Of the 2,100 students at my school, a vast majority of them now have MP3 players for their enjoyment.  Of the students that have MP3 players, there is one person besides myself who does not own an iPod.  This person was the only one who took my recommendation at a Creative Zen Touch model MP3 player.  At the time, he paid about $50 less than he would have for a comparable iPod, and got about 5 GB more space.

Personally, I bought a Palm back in September for my MP3 player.  It had never occurred to me, until the other day when I was showing it to a client, that this little unit is an MP3 player, and does just about everything else (short of playing CDs).  Why wait in line for hours, and pay twice as much for something that has half the capability (I’m speaking of the locals who waited for the iPod Video to come out.)

We got to talking, and my client showed me his grandson’s iPod Nano and was telling me how much he paid for it.  It amazed him that such a little unit could cost so much money.

He was really interested in my Palm–which is expandable to just about anything you can think of–because it had built in support for MP3, video, photos, had a color screen, a keyboard that it could be hooked up to, and was just amazed by the fact that I could switch out SD cards in it to manage my audio files.  When I run out of space on one card (which is rare), I can just order another card off of Newegg, pop it in, and boom–more space for music.

The more he looked at the little unit, the more he wanted one for himself.  I kept showing him cool little features and things I could do on it, and he kept getting more and more interested in learning about it.  Chances are, he will go get one now.  Maybe, even, he will show it to his friends, and his friends will go get the same thing.  I wonder, if just maybe, I’ve started a trend in 2006: the year of the PDA.