Tom Morris

Thought experiment. You work in the marketing and PR department of a company who makes a rather dull MP3 player with a tiny market share. Apple are whooping your arse by producing a device that doesn't waste time with the unimportant stuff but works beautifully and has all the important features.

What do you do? You paint your competitor as part of "the oppressive forces of cultural conformity". So it is with SanDisk (aka. the "media player freedom fighters"), who paint iPod users as "sheep" in their new website, iDont.com. (Via TUAW)

When I decided to buy an iPod, I worked out what features were important to me. First of all, podcast management with something akin to Smart Playlists. Second, synchronising play position between computer and player. Thirdly, a non-drag-and-drop interface. I had been living without those features in my previous MP3 player, and they annoyed me.

I asked people who had all different types of MP3 players. The iPod was the only one which had these three things. They save me hours and hours each week. Call me a sheep, but at least I'm not spending hours and hours micromanaging my MP3 files when some scripting can do it for me.

SanDisk marketing: you can bleat all you like, but unless you and the other MP3 player manufacturers follow Apple's lead and put in the important features that I want, then Apple is likely to continue getting my patronage.

Go on. Resist conformity, spend longer managing your files and enjoy using an MP3 player with less features.

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I've arrived back in London and am currently on the train back.

Even though I'm jetlagged and have been in motion for just over twelve hours, I've got to get some thoughts that have been buzzing around in my head for the last few hours out there.

First of all, not getting a window seat sucks enormous arse. When flying, always insist on either a window seat or an aisle seat. Being wedged in between two people for six or seven hours is horrible.

Especially if one of them is rather obnoxious with the operation of his body.

Second, the TSA isn't as bad as I expected. I had heard thousands of TSA horror stories. They were just as bad as the London security folk.

Thirdly, America rocks. Admittedly, my sample size - Boston and Cambridge, MA - may not be wholly representative of the nation.

It seems far less cynical and far less two-faced than Britain. Americans talk about money a lot, it is said. We're so much better, aren't we? We don't talk about money. No, we talk about property and which school one's kid goes to. We talk about money, we just use all sorts of boring middlemen to talk about it. Americans, if they are going to talk about money, do it.

Another thing: bagels are great. I want to find a good bagel shop in London, because bagels truly are the food of the gods.

A side point. Maps seem to be drawn differently of Boston than they are of London. If you see a map of London and you see a long street - like Oxford Street, for instance - you can quite easily gauge how long it takes to walk down it. Not so in Boston. When we say "five minutes walk from the station", we mean two minutes and time to buy a paper. When Americans say "five minutes walk from the station", they mean ten.

This sort of thing leads to rather large problems with planning out your day. This could have something to do with the way that the subway works. In London, you can guess how far central London stations are from one another. For instance, unless you're really burdened with luggage, it's not worth getting on the Tube to go from Embankment to Waterloo or South Ken to Gloucester Road. Try that trick in Boston and you get sore feet.

The other nice thing is that the T is so cheap, or at least feels cheap (note: not in the pejorative). You get these five coins out that look like 10p pieces and are worth only a little more than 10p, and you can go on a long journey. In London, you'd have to insert 24 of these funny little 10p like pieces (aka. "quarters") to take a Tube journey.

We also don't have these funny bus/tram hybrids that they have on the Silver Line - buses going through underground passages and with overhead wires powering them. Very odd.

I'm in love with Boston - it's a beautiful city, a living, breathing gesticulation to all the tedious European prejudices about America and Americans.

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