Please explain.....What's is the difference between....

[SeeDisney]

Hello,


Please help me with this quick question....I'm so out of it.


What is the difference between a MP3 player, IPOD? and IPOD nano?


If you had a 11 year old boy and a 9 year old girl, which would you buy from the those three.


I'm still from the "walkman" days and still say that word to my kids.

 

[babieemelly]

An MP3 player is just a general player that plays MP3s. An iPod is a brand of MP3 player, and an iPod Nano is a really small one. I personally hate iPod's. They're way overpriced for what you get, and there are much better ones out there on the market, it's just that iPod's are the cool thing right now. I have a 5G Sandisk Sansa and it's amazing! It holds a ridiculous amount of music and video, and it was half the price of an iPod.

 

[Christine]

They are all MP3 players.

iPod is a brand.

There is the iPod Shuffle which holds about 120 songs and is not programmable.

The iPod Nano comes with either 4MG or 8MG of memory and, based on what size you get can hold around 1,000 songs.

The regular iPod holds 3,000 songs I think???

They used to make an iPod Mini (which my DD still has) and it holds somewhere between what the Nano and Regular hold.

My son is 13 and he is getting an 8MG Nano in red. I think for a child in that age group that you are referring to, I might go with the shuffle or an off-brand.

 

[Minniemom97]

My 10 year old got a Sansa MP3 last year for Christmas - super easy to use (even my 69 year old dad has one and loves it).

 

[believe]

My DD will be 10 this month and she is getting the Ipod Nano. She used my older Ipod Nano version and loved it. She liked that you could do your list the way you wanted. We were looking at the Zune but decided against it because it would require more software on our computer and we were told the screen was more sensitive than the Ipod. Not sure if that is 100% true or not, but I didn't want to chance it with my DD. The main reason we were considering the Zune was that it also had the FM radio station capabilities and a larger screen for viewing videos, which the Ipods do not. There is also the Ipod Touch that came out this year and it allows you to surf the internet.

As others have said, they are all MP3 players....ipod is just an Apple brand name. First figure out what capabilities you want (storage amount, internet, ability, to pick songs, play videos, etc)...then go price them.

 

[wnissen]

Dear SeeDisney,

Christine did a good job describing the situation. Ipods are the only players able to use purchased music from the Itunes store. However, there are other places like Amazon.com and walmart.com that also sell music, so this isn't as important as it was a couple of years ago.

The shuffle is the only iPod that has no screen, which makes it more durable. Also, the Shuffle and Nano have zero moving parts, so they will hold up better when dropped. You can drop a regular iPod a couple times on hard surfaces, but it has a tiny hard drive inside that eventually will break. Only you can judge whether your kids are reliable enough to carry around an MP3 player. I'm almost thirty, and I decided I'm not responsible enough! It was losing the second cell phone in three months that gave me a clue...

The reason people buy iPods (beyond trendiness) is that they're easy to use, from the player all the way to the software. You do pay a premium for them, especially if you just want a super-basic model for a child. Unfortunately, unlike the Walkman where you can carry your own physical tapes and CDs, any MP3 player is going to require a computer with several GBs of free space to keep all those songs. How much space you'll need depends on how many CDs your kids have (one disc is about 60-100 megabytes), and how enterprising they are in stealing music on the Internet. I don't do it myself (really), but I know people who manage to download several gigabytes a week.

Walt

 

[NotUrsula]

As everyone else has said, an iPod is just a brand of mp3 player. However, it's a brand with a LOT of copyright restrictions on it, and it is restricted to only playing data in the mp3 format, which is not a very tight compression format; it takes a lot of memory. Apple brand players (aka iPods) are trendy and fashionable, which makes them expensive, and also makes them very popular targets for theft.

If it were me, I'd go with a non-Apple player for kids that age. They can hold songs in tighter compression modes so that you can get more songs onto the memory, they include radio, and many of them can also take add'l flash memory chips to expand their capacity easily. Also they cost WAY less than Apple products and are not as attractive to thieves.

We have a couple of Sandisk players that we like quite a bit. There have been a lot of sales on them in the fliers I've seen this holiday season. Players with video capacity are going to cost you more than those without it.

 

[Papa Deuce]

As everyone else has said, an iPod is just a brand of mp3 player. However, it's a brand with a LOT of copyright restrictions on it, and it is restricted to only playing data in the mp3 format, which is not a very tight compression format; it takes a lot of memory.

Not true. It also plays its OWN AAC file format which is a better file compression than mp3. Also, the iTunes store is now selling songs without any DRM ( digital rights management ... aka copyright protection ). It isn't a huge amount yet, but it grows week by week.

That aside, the BIG bonus is that iTunes is so easy to use, and offers so much in the way of downloading.