My collection at the moment is 14.09Gb, and when I ripped my CDs in I deliberately did them at MP3 encoding 160 or 192k. Only stuff I downloaded is going to be in anything different.

I've played with a colleague's iPhone and am stupendously impressed with the limited time I've spent with it. The only real negatives for me are the small capacity and the price. The LG was suggested by the aforementioned telesales bloke (who didn't know what he was on about, from the sound of things)

I'm likely to do a key rip in FLAC, which is another of these lossless rips, and auto-convert them all into mp3 for...

Do you want it all on there at once, though? I'm fairly sure that, as with the iPod Shuffle, you can tell iTunes to "sync all this music" for, say, 4Gb of stuff you know you want always and then choose at random from the rest of your library to fill the disk up. Each sync a different random selection is chosen. I know that'd do for me, there are all sorts of dusty corners of my music that I don't need at my fingertips at all times.

Note that the Viewty has no internal memory and the largest reasonably priced memory card I've seen for it is a 6Gb, for £20ish.

;)

A big factor in my enjoyment of iTunes, and part of the reason that I finally got off my arse and ripped everything into it (when I hadn't before with Winamp) and organised it and all... is that I love hearing from the dusty corners. Stuff that I might scroll past or forget I even had. You know what it's like: you have the music on, and are only half paying attention, and suddenly you notice you are really liking what you hear, and switch back to iTunes to see what it is.

Not bad. If I get one I'd almost certainly use the leftover money for an iPod, so the Viewty would be digital camera and phone only (rather like I currently use my 6233)

Did you doubt, EVEN FOR A SECOND, that I could vastly over-complicate this simple and mundane task?

The trick here is to use a clever linux facility to expose a file share on the server that appears to be full of mp3 files.. but actually doesn't even exist. The mp3 files are actually created on the fly, as they are requested, from the perfect-CD-copy FLAC files. I dunno how well it works in practice but it's very clever and I'd like to try it.

Fair comment. You should note, though, that the iPod Classic is quite a bit physically larger and heavier than the flash-based iPods because of the hard disk in there, and is much much larger than you need for music alone. Unless you'd get use out of it as an external hard disk I'd suggest your ideal iPod is a 16Gb Touch.

Fair enough. You should probably trot to CPW and actually hold some phones, by the sounds of it. Note that if you get an iPhone and unlock it you will be able to switch to a somewhat cheaper SIM-only O2 tariff like I have now (I pay £25 per month for 500 min, 1000 SMSs, and unlimited 3G data). I could have chosen unlimited landline calls, unlimited O2 calls, or unlimited WiFi instead of the 3G data bit. I dunno what the outlook is for unlocking the Viewty. The Viewty has no market in aftermarket software either; personally, having had a smartphone where I could put freeware of all sorts on it, I wouldn't go back to a featurephone.

A big factor in my enjoyment of iTunes, and part of the reason that I finally got off my arse and ripped everything into it (when I hadn't before with Winamp) and organised it and all... is that I love hearing from the dusty corners. Stuff that I might scroll past or forget I even had. You know what it's like: you have the music on, and are only half paying attention, and suddenly you notice you are really liking what you hear, and switch back to iTunes to see what it is.

Does anyone else agree that I appeared hostile?

I felt a bit of a twat using it in the pub.

This, this. Using it at work guarantees comments along the lines of "someone obviously gets paid too much", even from those bastards earning literally twice what I do.

To be fair, as far as they know you just spent £800 on a phone.

People do tend to mock you for being a cheapskate when they discover it's on PAYG. Often the same people who were just previously mocking you for spending a ridiculous amount on a phone. I hate those people.

I'm really impressed with it so far, so much so that I've bought one for Ange also.

ZOMG, I've just checked out the O₂ iPhone tariffs, and they give you unlimited data transfer!

I wish it would hurry up and arrive!

I was boasting to my friend about the landscape/portrait magicalness of it. She told me her boyfriends' Sony Erricson does it. D'oh, I'm not going to be as special as I thought.

Ah yes, the fact that I have just quoted Myoptika saying he has bought Ange a phone probably means that it is Myoptika. OR that something very fishy is going on...

Wow, this app thing is a pain in the arse. A lovely program called "Installer" is present on the unlocked iphone, which connects to the interweb and provides a huge catalogue of native apps you can apparently download and install straight off. Except! After installing Tap Tap Revolution, every single attempt at other software gives "Error / Package download failed!". Fab!