My iPod broke, and it’s sort of a sore subject. I had a 40GB photo model from a few years back that I got from one of those “free iPod” websites. They really work (or at least, one did a few years ago), I just had to kind of stay on top of them, but after a few weeks of “processing” and about $10 in trial offers, I had a brand new iPod. After about a year, the battery started to go, and I was able to get a refurbished one from Apple. Another year later, and wouldn’t you know it, but that battery started to go, too. It kind of sputtered for a few more months, working whenever it felt like it, then randomly shutting off. It got so bad I could only hope to get a few songs out of it, if I was lucky. Then one day, it just died. All I could get out of the thing was the frowny face of doom and an awful whirring sound. Maybe it couldn’t take all my Weird Al and 80’s songs, who knows.

Anyway, I had previously committed all extra cash to a new TV, I was hoping to find a way to listen to my tunes without spending a lot of cash. Then I remembered my cell phone, the Samsung Alias, was supposed to be an mp3 player. All I needed was a Micro SD card, and an adapter to plug in my headphones. (The phone came with such an adapter, but I lost it.) The adapter cost me - no joke - a penny on ebay.

And speaking of pennies and things that are easily lost, holy crap are micro SD cards tiny. Check it out:

Fortunately, all of these cards come with adapters that make them, in effect, regular SD cards, and my computer has a slot for cards, so I was able to plug it into my desktop and transfer a bunch of tunes on to the card very easily. The card was only 2GB, which is a far cry from the 40GB I was used to on my iPod, and picking out favorites was not an easy task.

But I gotta say, once I was listening to music on my cell phone, I was impressed. The ID tags from iTunes are read flawlessly, the menu is easy to navigate, and most importantly, the songs sound completely decent. Who knew this could be so easy?

Yeah, it’s not an iPhone, I know. But considering they’ll probably never be available for Verizon and they cost a small fortune, I don’t know at what point one of those will be in my future. And this solution was much cheaper: the adapter was next to nothing, and the micro SD card was under $10. And I can use that again later in my Wii, digital camera, digital picture frame, or anything else that accepts SD cards. I get less storage space than I’d like, but overall, it’s not a bad way to listen to music on my commute, and I don’t even have to carry an extra gadget with me.