iPod, uPod, we all Pod

Next month will be the tenth anniversary of the introduction of the iPod, and I've been seriously thinking about looking into buying one.

I'd like to be one of those people walking around with white wires coming out of their ears. I'd also like to wear all black and take my dog to work.

I seem to always be multiple generations behind in technology. I was down in the basement the other day -- always a scary proposition -- and came across boxes of cassette tapes. Remember those? Music for the car, but cars don't have cassette players anymore. And a ton of brand spanking new blank tapes.

Time to retire our old stereo system with its big speakers -- great for lamps and plants, btw. So I'm thinking of getting an iPod and a Bose thingy with a dock for the iPod. I'll have to get all these CDs onto the iPod but maybe there's a thingy for that. (I was about 10 years behind on CDs, too.)

So iPod has come out with a new line of toys. Here's what you can do with the iTouch.

Music, movies, TV shows, videos, games, applications, ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, photos, Safari web browser, email, Maps, FaceTime, HD video recording and editing, Nike + iPod support built in.

It won't change a flat tire. With 64 gigabytes, it can store 80 hours of video or 14,000 songs. Who has 14,000 songs? How many songs are there anyway?

Some folks at WikiAnswers have wrestled with that. Here are two responses.

On Average, there are 50 albums released every week in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1878 but it was always a very poor seller. The first artist to sell serious numbers of records was Frank Sinatra in the 1940 (250,000,000 records in his lifetime), so lets start there!
Lets also assume that there are 12 songs per album.
50 albums per week * 52 weeks = 2500 per year
2500 per year * 69 years = 179,400 unique albums (since 1940)
12 songs * 179,400 albums = 2,152,800 songs
So the average points to about 2,100,000 songs being released in the United States of America and the United Kingdom (and nowhere else) in musical history, give or take.

A visit to Gracenote's media database shows 97,206,484 songs in the database. This includes international music, different edits of the same song, and recordings of classical music, but indicates that the 2.1 million above may actually be a low estimate. 

Okay, there you have it, give or take. This does not count that antidepressant jingle I can't get out of my head.

Oh, nearly forgot. The original purpose of this post was to tell you that Popular Science has reviewed the new iPods.