One benefit is that it doesn’t take long to fill via a USB connection; but for that you’ll only get about an hour of music. But at £199, good design just doesn’t come cheap.The same is true for Apple’s iPod, which comes in two versions, one holds up to 5 gigabytes (5,000 Mb) and the other up to 10 Gb That’s enough for 1,000 and 2,000 songs. With those models costing £349 and £429 respectively, the iPod has been called “the £1,500 MP3 player” since Apple only intended for it to be connectable to Apple machines. However, a company called Mediafour has produced XPlay ( http:// /products/xplay), which lets PCs and iPods communicate, as long as your PC has a Firewire port. If it doesn’t, you will need to buy a Firewire plug-in card, which will cost between £20 and £80. Xplay works rather well; the iPod shows up as a drive in your window, and you can drag songs on to it from Windows Media Player.But the iPod really starts to shine once plugged into an Apple machine. If you have iTunes it will start it up and immediately synchronise its contents with any songs and “playlists” you have there.

If you have more than 5 or 10Gb of songs, then it’ll send over all the playlists it can to your iPod, and then stop. You can also use the iPod for data storage, of files and contact details (from a Palm). A suitably rich troubleshooter can carry around the equivalent of back-up disk plus music while he, or she, works.What is really impressive, though, is the speed of song-loading. Firewire runs at up to 400 Mbits/s, rather than the 12 Mbits/s of USB. That means that you can fill up an iPod in about five minutes. Even smarter is that the Firewire connection recharges the battery, which does get the advertised 10 hours of playing time. (There’s also a separate mains charger.)Turn it on and you really begin to see why Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head of design, has almost achieved godhead among his peers.

What design would you pick to find one of 2,000 songs on something the size of a cigarette packet? The iPod solves that with a little scroll wheel between the central button and the outer four buttons (for on/off, backward, forward, and menu). You can whirl it around with a thumb and hit just the track you want in a few moments Simple, and brilliant. Even the headphone lead is plenty long enough to put the player in a trouser pocket – a detail sometimes overlooked by others I’ve struggled to find a design fault OK, here it is: the headphone jack sticks straight up. In my world, it’ll get broken sooner or later.So is the iPod worth it? If you own a PC and adore music on the move, then its cool quotient is beyond reproach; and the capacity beats most other players (though Creative Labs says its own are larger, but didn’t have one for testing) Yes, it’s expensive Yes, you could buy other things with that money. So ask yourself: do you want to carry your music collection around with you? If so, it’s far ahead of the pack.

http:// / digital_audio_player/yepp/yp_30s.html http:// /ipod. As guests arrived last Friday evening for a “surprise” party to celebrate his 40 years in Parliament, Tam Dalyell appeared lost for words. The father of the House of Commons, one of Tony Blair’s more vociferous critics, gave the gracious impression that the arrival of 150 friends at Whitburn Miners’ Club in West Lothian was unexpected. Tomorrow night West Lothian Council are very kindly giving me a party and the freedom of West Lothian I am very lucky.