What I wish they made

For the past week, Heather and I have been going to the gym more. Well, more Heather than me at the moment. Each time we go, she and I both take a music player. I take my Archos Gmini 120 that I purchased back in 2004, and she uses her smart phone. Now, when I use my mp3 player, I put it in my pockets because I have caught the headphone cord to many times and dropped it on the phone, but Heather does not have the luxury of pockets. Every time that she has gone, she has done just this, and with her phone being around 300 dollars, I cringe every time it hits the floor. This is probably due more to the fact that I dropped her first phone on the carpet in our old places, and it cracked the screen. So to prevent us from having to have the phone repaired one of these times that we are not lucky, we ordered her a smaller, cheaper mp3 player for her. It was a SanDisk Sansa e280, a 8 GB storage device for around 75 dollars. Much cheaper than her phone, even with the insurance plan.

As we were looking around, I was thinking to myself that I listen to more Pandora.com lately than I do mp3s, because I can stream it at work and customize the station based on the mood that I am in that day. Also, with the Timbers having open Wi-Fi in the office/gym, I wish that I could buy a player that had a built in Wi-Fi so I could stream my Pandora station while I was at the gym. Unfortunately, the only devices that I know of with the flash player and the wi-fi are smart phones or the iPhone. Now, if the iPod touch could do this...that might be a reason for me to actually start thinking about owning an Apple product. Besides that, I wouldn't touch the Touch with a 10' USB cable.

I have also been thinking about getting a new player because the Archos is nice, but it is just a bit to big for what I am needing. Don't get me wrong, I have loved this player since I got it, but when you are lifting and doing exercise, a device the size of a laptop battery is not what I want in my pocket. If I was to go with a new player, I would really love to find a way to "time shift" Pandora, or record what is played (streamed) down to mp3 files that I could take it with me on the player. I guess until I can find a way to do this, I will just have to start looking at other ways to get my music.