An iPod has become the best selling portable music player. Designed and marketed by Apple Inc., its sale has crossed 140 million pieces. This brand enjoys the market share of more than 60% in portable media players category.

There are many portable media players available in the market. Many big corporations world wide have many such products. Then, what is the reason for such a huge popularity of a single product called ipod?

Ease of use has been cited as the chief reason. An end user finds it difficult to accept a product that is complicated to use. He becomes dissatisfied, distraught and ultimately abandons it. Apple accomplished this factor beautifully. Despite new technologies, an ipod is very easy to use. It gives ample satisfaction to an end user.

iTunes software is required for music downloads from iTunes Store. Both are owned by Apple. Present versions support mac and windows computers. You can download pop music, rock or any type of music. It can play all iTunes Store music and other limited external sources.

An iPod can play mp3, AAc, AIFF and Apple Lossless file format and other limited standard file formats. Music files from Napster and MSN can not be played due to digital rights management issues.

Classic, Nano and Touch are main model line ups. Classic is based on hard drive storage and offer capacities ranging from 20 giga bytes to 160 giga bytes. Nano offers storage ranging from 1 to 8 giga bytes. Latest classic and nano models can play video and image files also. Nano and Touch models are based on Flash memory cards.

It has won many awards as Most Innovative Audio Product, Fourth Best Computer Product and Engineering Excellence. An iPod has become most reputed audio product.