Steve Jobs is a one trick pony!!!

My iPod has recently been relegated to a secondary music player. Sort of. Basically my 3G iPod died a while back so was replaced by a 2Gb Nano. Not the same thing at all - time for lots of smart playlists tracking "last played" and standard playlists of favourites to fit what I wanted into 2Gb. Until I realised that I was actually coping reasonably well in such a small space. Annoying when I decide I want to listen to "Appetite for Destruction" in its entirety and it's only got "My Michelle" on it (rubbish), but for the most part it works a treat when you stick it on shuffle.

I recently got a K610i Sony Ericsson phone - not a Walkman, but pretty similar (the same music player, but lacking a radio, the headphones aren't as good and it doesn't look as good). Listening to music on there I noticed that the sound quality is noticeably better. I also noticed that a 2Gb memory stick only costs twenty quid. So I bought one, copied my tunes over (even my iTunes store purchases are re-ripped to Mp3) and enjoyed. Apart from scroll-wheeling through 2Gb of songs is easy. Down-buttoning through 2Gb of songs is not. (Slight aside: the problems with this setup are my play counts aren't updated, screwing up my smart playlists - although the iTunes 7.2 debacle has blown them away - and I still need the iPod for in the car).

Likewise, I remember using a simple GUI on my Commodore 64, controlled by a (digital) joystick. It did the job but it took forever to move from one side of the screen to the other. Compare that to using a mouse on a Mac.

And finally, browsing the web on my K610i (or even the awful Windows Mobile phone I had before) is acceptable, given the small screen. But it is a right pain in the arse to navigate through a page of links a down-button at a time.

In all three cases, his Steveness has taken an interface with slow, clunky navigation and made it fast and accurate. One trick, repeated three times.