This thing is slick. It sounds great, the form factor is awesome, very small and thin, yet feels durable enough so that it won't break in your pocket. The color screen is very nice and the controls are very intuitive.That being said, the only reason I bought this iPod was because the battery in the old Mini I had was absolute crap, yet I had invested a tidy sum in music from iTunes. Hopefully this iPod will perform better than the mini series but, malfunctioning batteries or not, the best bet is to buy CDs and burn them to MP3 so you are not locked into buying iPods all the time and the outrageously overpriced accessories required to do anything but listen to it with headphones.