Pros: Sounds great, looks great, tons of storage. It's the standard others compare themselves to.
Cons: Miniature hard disk drive is more fragile than flash memory music devices.
The bottom line: It's the standard and for good reasons. The storage is huge, it's easy to use, and looks and sounds good
Face it. The iPod has set the standard for portable personal media entertainment. It's the one that all the other guys, SanDisk, Creative, MS Zune, etc. have to compare themselves to. The iPod Classic has raised the bar again. As a former user of the 5th generation iPod, the enhancements added to the iPod classic made it easy to justify upgrading to the iPod Classic. As a former user of several of the "other guys" mp3 players, I can easily recommend the Apple iTunes/iPod system as being head and shoulders above the other systems.

The new iPod Classic has a matte finish metal case front that is really rugged. It resists scratches, fingerprints, and just feels good. The old 5th generation iPod had a scratch prone plastic front that looked beat up after only a month of use. Yeah, the back of the case is still that shiny tin plated metal that is easily scratched, but I usually look at the face of the iPod Classic, not the back. The touch sensitive control "wheel" is easy to use, and pretty cool technology.

With 80 GB of memory of storage minimum, the iPod Classic can store the contents of most users' music collections with room to spare for photos, games, videos, television programs and even movies. The one downside of the 80 GB storage is that it contains a tiny hard drive. While the disk is fairly rugged, it can be damaged by hard use and falls. If you fear that your iPod is likely to be dropped, you might want to opt for an iPod Nano, Shuffle, or Touch which use solid state flash memory, but don't have the huge capacity of the iPod Classic.

The other improvements that have been added to the iPod Classic include a brighter screen, improved battery life, "cover flow" album viewing, easier searches for songs, artists and albums, and more intuitive song playing options.

When you buy an iPod, you're also buying into the Apple iTunes universe of music and entertainment management and purchasing. iTunes is pretty good, and the way it enforces DRM (Digital Rights Management, aka copy protection) isn't too onerous. Generally, you can play your purchased songs on five computers that you have registered, and some iTunes music is available without copy protection at all. iTunes also has several free music downloads available each week, and is the main clearinghouse for hundreds, if not thousands of free "podcasts", basically prerecorded special interest radio and video presentations.

The iTunes program that you use on your computer lets you copy or "rip" the songs off of your CD's and in many cases will help you find the cover art for those CD's. iTunes then lets you transfer the songs to your iPod through your computer's USB port. One tip, when you rip tunes off your CD's save them as mp3's instead of the iTunes AAC format. All of your friends can use mp3 files regardless of the system they use. Apple iTunes AAC format is proprietary, and IF some better system comes along, you can safely bet that system will be able to use mp3 files.

The iPod Classic sounds great with the included bud style earphones, but if you don't like the included headphones, there are hundreds earphones you can choose from in all price ranges and every configuration. There are also hundreds of add-on products for iPods including docking stations, auxiliary speakers, FM tuners, FM converters, cases, and the list goes on. No other personal entertainment system is better supported by third party vendors.

As long as you can be reasonably gentle on the iPod's hard disk drive, the iPod Classic is a great entertainment purchase.