One of the odd things about having kept this up for ~15 years is that there is plenty of old stuff I don’t remember it all, like: https://www.cubiclehermit.com/archives/482
For the record.
I do not now, and I have never owned an iPod or Zune.
I’ve owned three MP3 players:
[….]
I keep hoping that battery life on my PDA/phones will improve to the point where it will not be necessary to have a separate MP3 player. Sadly, I see little improvement there, and my present phone (a new HTC Touch Pro) is something of a step backwards for music player use as they went from a semi-proprietary small headset plug to an entirely proprietary USB+sound+etc plug.
(Lest the basic reference not make sense)
For the record, I do not now, and have never owned any Apple iDevices, nor any Intel Macs, nor any Microsoft portable consumer electronics (although I’ve had and have had a few keyboards, mice, and 3 generations of XBox [edit late 2021: 4].)
For that worth, it basically be be about another ~2 years before I got a phone that could “just work” as an MP3 player with adequate battery life. The HTC Touch Pro got replaced with a “Sprint Epic” (a 1st-gen Galaxy S with a slider keyboard) which also brought back proper headphone jacks.
(I’ve yet to succumb to a headphone-jack-less phone in the return of such things, but it seems close to inevitable… 🙁 )
Oh, and the dead WSJ link there seems to refer to this: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2270831/zunegate–is-obama-an-ipresident-or-not-.html