The Good
The music quality is quite good, I love the interface and the automatically created play lists like the 25 Most Played, Recently Added Files, 90's Music are all quite helpful. The songs are all classified either according to the album, artist or genre. Alternatively you can browse through all the songs. You can also save notepad files on your iPod which you can read (if you can read extremely tiny font size..). You can also save your photos run a slideshow with it too. Unlike a CD Player the iPod does not have any moving parts, so you will not experience any skips while jogging or exercising, as you would in a Portable CD player. All in all the iPod is quite a handy device. it satisfies all my music needs.

The Bad and the Ugly!
1. Very delicate. You sit on it by mistake and you could end up screwing up your iPod's screen. Your iPod screen will not be repaired, and your iPod will not be replaced, if you are very luck perhaps you can get it through the apple guys, but I remember reading an article that said Apple has shut shop in India, so I don't know if that's possible anymore.
2. Global warranty is not accepted in India in any case. So if you have bought it from outside and it gets spoilt you will have to get it repaired outside, preferably the country you bought it from in the first place.
3. Also the earphones tend to get spoilt with usage. But if you are careful enough they will run for a long, long time.
4. Batteries for the iPod cost more
5. There is no equalizer in the iPod. Be careful not to put large files on the iPod as it eats up a lot of battery life.
6. KEEP IT THE HELL AWAY FROM WATER!! Do not take it along, even inside your bag when it is raining! Your battery and screen both will get screwed.
7. Also no charger is provided along with the iPod, you have to buy your own, if you buy Apple's own charger, its costs more. Beware don't buy cheaper non apple product chargers.

I have got an Apple iPod Mini MP3 player, and I love it! My brother has the iPod Photo, and we both love them. The only minor problems are that it is difficult to rip from a CD to iTunes. It is faster to rip to Windows Media Player and to then transfer to iTunes. It is still nothing but fun, and it has a simple layout and is easy to use. It has no rubbish, tacky or cheap buttons!

I got my 5 gig the day it came out, and have never regreted the money spent, not only is it an MP3 player but I can also throw some files on it and use it as a fire wire HD, talk about easy, plug it in and away it goes, snycing all my MP3s, dates, contacts, I mean can this get any better?

Where the Apple iPod portable MP3 player wins is storage density, other multi-GB players are considerably larger.
But compared to a portable audio products from, say, Sony, Sharp etc., Apple's inexperience shows. The user interface is so-so rather than great. In my opinion, they have paid more attention to form than function.
Whilst 'navigation' to tracks is efficient, operation is another matter, fast fwd/rev are far too slow, you cannot 'reverse into' a track, iPod loses it's place easily, no tone controls (some say they should not be necessary, but at low volumes the ear becomes less sensitive to low frequencies, so a way to boost them is necessary for quiet listening).
Sound quality is comparable to md/cassette, i.e. fine, although there is a design fault causing an audible 'whine', but this is only noticeable in quiet passages.
The earbuds are just tooooo big, no other manufacturer produces them this size, why did Apple? buy better ones.
There is a serious bug with buffer management on tracks above a certain size, this results in only 20-30% of claimed battery life and causes the unit to become so hot it can be almost painful to hold. This fault is not an issue for users playing short tracks, but for continuous mix, classical, audio books etc. it is a serious limitation and again highlights Apple's inexperience in this type of product.

The Apple iPod portable MP3 player is a dream machine: clean clear and classy sound, hyper-fast at downloading music (it takes seconds to update with whole CDs thanks to the Firewire connection), slick controls that are easy-to-use. It's made me start to convert all my legacy cassettes and LPs (anyone remember them?) to mp3, and it's so small it goes with me everywhere. Brilliant! The best thing I've bought in years!!

The Apple iPod is the number 1 portable mp3 player on the market. It sports a firewire connection to load around a 1000 mp3's in seconds. Excellent interface which makes synchronization with your desktop computer possible.