The general consensus, as far as I can tell, is that the reason the iPod has the portable music/video market dominated is because it’s such a well-made and beautiful device, with seamless iTunes integration. Well let me tell you, there’s PLENTY of room for improvement. Here are my biggest criticisms of the iPod:

• The clickwheel:
  Guess what, the touch-sensitive wheel you can click to navigate and play/pause/rewind/fast forward… it sorta sucks. Mostly this is a problem of execution, not design–the clickwheel was a revelation when Apple introduced it, but in my everyday user experience it turns out that the iPod’s clickwheel is a bit temperamental. On my old iPod Mini, it only sporadically even detects my finger, leading to a stuttering herky-jerky scrolling where at one second a full rotation doesn’t budge the selection bar and the next second a millimeter finger movement shoots the selection bar down several entries. Even on my new iPod–a month or so old–I’ve been having some trouble with this problem. I don’t know if this speaks to build quality (see below) or design, but it’s an incredibly irritating problem since it can’t be reliably corrected for. Still, in theory a scroll wheel is probably the best way of getting through a long list of items, though. Which leads me to my next complaint:
• The menu system:
  Now look, it’s fine to navigate by scrolling through lists of songs/albums/artists when you have 150 songs on your adorable little flash player. But at this point my iPod holds something like 55 gigabytes of music. That’s about 10,500 songs. And you’re telling me that if I want to track down a song when I only know the track name, I’ve got to scroll through 10,500 entries to find it? That’s ludicrous. Give me a little virtual keyboard to scroll through so I can search by text string. The Rio Karma I bought 4 years ago managed this trick and I used it all the time. My cell phone does that; why doesn’t my iPod?
• On-the-go playlists:
  On-the-go playlists aren’t a vital feature, but if you’re gonna have them you might as well do it right. If you want to put together a playlist, there are two ways to go about it:
  1. Figure out what songs you want on the playlist in advance, and use the damnable menu navigation to find the songs and add them to the playlist.
  2. In the course of listening to your music, think “I’d like to add this to my on-the-go playlist” and do it right then, while you’re listening to it.

  Now guess which of these two ideas is supported on the iPod, and which isn’t. If you guessed that the second, intuitive, easy idea works seamlessly, congratulations: you’re as wrong as you’ve ever been. You can’t just hold down the middle button on the clickwheel to add a song to your on-the-go playlist while the song is actually playing. Why? I have no idea. Go ahead, try it right now. See how it doesn’t work? An amazing and bizarre missing feature that would be easy to add.

• More navigation problems:
  Similarly, there’s no quick way to navigate to the album of the song you’re listening to. Why can’t I just press “menu” and have that as an option?
• The screen:
  The iPod screen sucks. It’s an energy hog, it’s low-resolution, it’s got a standard aspect ratio in a widescreen world, and it collects scratches like crazy. If there’s one characteristic of the iPod that a new entry to the market could immediately and demonstrably improve upon, it’s this.
• Build quality:
  Considering how well-made Apple products are supposed to be, I’ve had a lot of problems with mine, ranging from a defective battery to a mysterious and catastrophic hardware failure. Apple is great about fixing or replacing their products when they break, but it sure would be nice to spend my $300 and not have to think about it again for a couple of years.
• iTunes:
  I won’t say anything about iTunes for the Mac, because a) I’ve never used it; and b) from what I hear, it’s a wonderful program that works quickly and well on OSX. But I have a lot of problems with the Windows XP iteration of the program.
  1. Installation:
     Why must my computer be embossed with quicktime icons and system tray agents every single time I update to the newest version of iTunes? And that’s not even taking into account the occasional music library meltdown that results from approximately one out of every five iTunes updates.
  2. Memory use:
     Simply put, iTunes uses far too much memory. It’s astonishing and absurd. Similarly, every time I close the program my processor load jumps up to 100% for ten or fifteen seconds. Unacceptable. The program is so filled with arcane options and confusing interface choices that it might as well have been put together by Microsoft.
  3. Design:
     iTunes looks and functions more or less as it did five years ago. You’re telling me nobody’s come up with a better interface for a music organization and playing program in five years? Doubtful. (This criticism applies to iPod design as well.)

The sad part, of course, is that the iPod is by far the best player on the market. The problems I listed above are drops in the bucket compared to the significant deficiencies of everything else on the market–abysmal user interfaces, buggy and crash-prone operating systems, proprietary song-transfer programs and/or connection wires, ugly or garish design, etc. But many of these deficiencies are Apple’s fault (not that I blame them for trying to maximize their iPod sales)–they’ve patented the clickwheel, they’ve created a pretty sweet monopoly limiting iTunes Store users to iPods (and limiting iPod users to the iTunes Store*), and they’ve been astonishingly successful at commodifying individuality such that millions of people feel cool and unique for buying the same thing as everyone else.

My point here is not to say that the iPod sucks. My point here is to say that, well, the iPod does sort of suck, and there’s plenty of room in the market for a simple, powerful, intuitive, and affordable competing device. Unfortunately, the first product in Microsoft’s upcoming Zune line doesn’t appear to be that device–it pretty much looks like an ugly imitation of a 3G iPod (circa 2003). Sooner or later, however, somebody’s going to release a device that makes the iPod instantaneously obsolete. Of course that somebody will probably be Apple.

* Buying music through online stores that use file encryption is its own brand of dumb, in my opinion–that’s a whole other post–but it’s clearly here to stay; so the more songs people buy off of iTunes the more dependent they become on iPods.