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Since I live on a limited income, I do my best to avoid lusting after gadgets, but the iPod Nano is so dang cool. I've thought earlier iPod were well designed, and thought an iPod Mini would be nice to have. But, apart from the iPod Shuffle, all of the iPods were based on small hard drives. My main interest in an mp3 player these days is to have music for running, and I'm afraid that I'd be too hard on a device with a spinning platter.

The iPod Nano models use solid-state flash memory, and offer a lot of space for a surprisingly low cost. $249 for a 4GB player is crazy cheap, even if it is way out of my budget. The things are so damn pretty, and most mp3 player interfaces are so hideously bad that paying a premium price for an Apple product seems worth it.

Still, the iPod Nano seems a little delicate. Sooner or later, I would drop it running or getting off the bus, so I was apt to write the player off until I saw Ars Technica's stress-test of the Nano. They took the player through its paces, and the thing survives. The LCD screen didn't crack until they started tossing it out of a moving car. Despite the broken display, it kept playing music, even after running it over with a Volkswagen. If I ever have the dough to buy one of these suckers, I'll feel pretty confident it will last.