Decisions in the Age of Digital Media

Recently, I had to make a tough decision. You see, I love good music as well as good movies. And over the years I have truly enjoyed taking my music and a limited few movies with me using my original Zune 30GB. It still works incredibly well, and I’ve only changed the battery out once. But now that I’m traveling a bit more with all these wonderful conventions like E3, CES, Wonder-Con, Comic-Con and who knows what’s next!, I wanted a little more flexibility. Especially with my movies.

When you buy a newly released movie these days, often enough you receive a digital copy of the film. That digital copy can be downloaded to your computer via iTunes and in some rare cases, Windows Media Player. In either case, I am unable to load most of these movies onto my Zune. So what was I to do?

I looked hard and long at my options. The Zune HD looked really good to me, but it won’t accept my iTunes movies. It’s a solid player otherwise and if not for the locked into iTunes movies, I probably would have sprung for the 64GB Zune HD. Another competitor was the Creative Touch 2 looked impressive as it runs Android 2.1 (unfortunately not 2.2 or 3.0) but the biggest downside was the storage maxed at 16GB. Archos was another brand I looked at, but alas I could not find a non Apple solution.

It was with bitter sorrow that I decided upon the iPod Touch 4th with 64GB. It may yet be my only hope to take those movies with me. For music only, I would have got with the Zune HD; however movies were a mixed equation that Apple seems to have solved (and probably created). Will this iPod be enough for my demands? Time will tell. I will let you know how this story ends after I get my iPod in the mail. And then perhaps I can find a nice case from Speck!
Until then, find some good music and enjoy some good vibrations.