The reason that the ipod is so popular is that it's so darn good. There is very good integration between the iPod and iTunes.

For listening to podcasts I would recommend a low end iPod nano. Podcasts are extremely easy to find and subscribe to in iTunes, copy automatically to the ipod and are very easy to find and listen to on the iPod. The iPod understands what podcasts are and how they need to be handled differently than music.

One thing that is important (that the ipod does well) is what I call marking a podcast as listened to (like marking email as read). Once you listen to a podcast to the end (or very close to the end) it gets marked as listened to, and disappears from your ipod (unless you change that option). This way there is always fresh podcasts on your ipod and you never have to do manual management.

The Zune pulls a close second to the iPod, it has the same features, it is just missing the polish that an iPod has (plus MS may abandon the zune at any moment).

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