"Actually, I'm not in favor of any company cornering any market. Competition is good. You'd think that Jobs and company would welcome RealNetworks and others into the digital music selling business for the iPod. But, no, Apple wants to be the sole DRM-provided music source."
The latest compatiblity charts show the creative, i-river and rio players are compatible with most any service. Too bad the pod firmware is so restricted and incompatible or I would be tempted to buy one myself.
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6490_7-5140299.html?tag=dir.comp
Apple, Real, and others are all vying to become the standard format to which the music industry targets its content. Generally speaking, the music industry will not use a format that fails to implement DRM (digital rights management) to protect the music content from redistribution. So MP3 -- the almost universal interchange format between the players -- isn't really an option for online music sellers. Apple will not license its DRM format to companies such as Real, etc, because it wants to be the sole online provider for the music industry. And you can see from the compatibility chart that Apple isn't as compatible with the available formats as many other planers. In some ways, I don't blame Apple for this strategic move. It makes good business sense. But if Apple prevails, it means that consumers will pay more for music than they would if there were a diverse competitive environment. Apple's response to Real's encroachment has been to issue firmware updates to defeat Real's reverse-engineering. This is sleazy. If MSFT had done this, Mac partisans would be screaming like stuck pigs -- but, somehow, when Jobs does it, they merely genuflect and cross themselves.