iPod mini Begins to Ship -- The iPod mini, which Apple announced last month at Macworld Expo San Francisco 2004, is starting to trickle into consumer's hands. A $250 version of Apple's popular iPod music player, the iPod mini sports a tiny 4 GB hard drive in an enclosure that weighs only 3.6 ounces (102 grams) and comes in 5 anodized aluminum colors. What makes the iPod mini appealing to me, though, is the way Apple's designers incorporated the control buttons into the solid-state scroll wheel, a much better implementation than the four separate buttons on current iPods that are difficult to navigate with one hand and too often get pressed accidentally. Apple retail stores are supposed to receive shipments of the iPod mini on 20-Feb-04; people who ordered one shortly after Macworld Expo are receiving shipping notices now. [JLC]

<http://www.apple.com/ipodmini/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07494>