The day before the first iPod was to launch a co-worker (in marketing, at Apple) loaned me an iPod to take home over night. To this day I am blown away as to how that happened. No way that could have happened with the first iPhone. (In case he was not supposed to do so I'll withhold his name.)

We (the family) were at a car dealership that evening and to entertain my 3 year old I put the ear buds in her ears and gave her the iPod to rock out to.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one batted and eye or seemed to take notice of a little girl sporting the white earbuds that would become so iconic later.

Related memory after the iPhone had come out: I remember being on a train in Tokyo where, counting the two other Apple employees with me, we all three had our iPhones out.

Looking around the train though at all the Tokyo-ites with their flip phones and lanyards I began to doubt whether the iPhone was ever going to be able to conquer Japan. If for no other reason, where do you attach a lanyard?

(Or maybe there's a better term for that bit of "personalization" that dangled like a tassel from all the cool, urban Japanese flip-phones.)

it's continually bizarre to me that Japan exists as a tiny insular market that gets all kinds of products and devices that never make it anywhere else, not even china or the rest of SEA.

The rest of the world we never stop hearing about 'there isn't a market for X' but Japan is this tiny market that gets their own things all the time.

> (Or maybe there's a better term for that bit of "personalization" that dangled like a tassel from all the cool, urban Japanese flip-phones.)

I believe the Japanese call it a "strap", transliterated directly.

I just wish there was a good way to sync Spotify/YTM playlists to these offline devices.

What I have seen is using the 5th gen iPods with new firmware is great.