iPod related unrecovery and alternatives

Sad news: My iPod would have been delivered by now – if I’d been in vienna. As I knew that I’d be in carinthia I asked a friend of mine to accept the iPod for me, but as the UPS delivery guy never bothered to call me on my supplied phone number and just placed a notification that he was there (without any answering number or tracking code, thanks) I just don’t have any clue where my hardware ist.

A half-hour apple support center call later (what is it with apple’s staff that I always have to reread all of my data which stands on _their_ homepage to them?) I still don’t have the UPS tracking number but the help desk woman will work things out with UPS and the iPod should be delivered to me at carinthia. Maybe. Maybe not. I was told to recall them on fryday to check. Why? I don’t want to know.

As this didn’t include any repair of my iPod (hopefully it will have recovered by magic) I have started to look for alternatives. I thought that the mp3 player market was huge, but well, it isn’t.

For now I only found the following contestants

• The Cowon iAudio X5 supports FLAC, explicitly states linux OS support and would come with an up to 60GB HDD. Looks somehow crappy but if the iPod situation doesn’t get better I’d be pressed into buying one of those. While the base player would cost as much as my iPOD U2 Edition (20GB) had cost 1.5 years ago the docking station and remote will increase the final price a bit (never mind that I never had any of that with my iPod)
• The Cowon iAudio m3 comes from the same company, looks better but hasn’t FLAC or LinuxOS support (whatever the later really means) and just goes up to 40GB.
• A linux zune fork: sounds too hackerish to ever work well

I’d be gratefull for any comments or other recommendations.

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