If you've been looking around for an mp3 player or iPod, chances are you're very confused with the vast array of models out there.

You've heard that you can get your entire music collection onto one player; and that's true - but not every player.

You have also been told that you can throw them around, go jogging with them, climb a mountain with one, and all this is true - but again, not every player will withstand this treatment.

Basically, if you want to get physical with your player, you need one with no moving parts. In this case, the standard iPod is not what you want; although you might consider the iPod Nano.

The hard drive mp3 players allow you to store thousands of tunes.

The memory based version sacrifices the amount of music storage for freedom of movement. These are recommended for sports uses.

The mp3 CD players read the mp3 music from a CD which you have pre-burned.

One minute of CD quality mp3 takes up around 1Mb.

The memory based mp3 players have a top limit of around 512Mb meaning you can get roughly 120 average length tunes on there.

Top end hard drive versions go up to as much as 80Gb, which is a whole lot of music - more than twenty thousand tunes.

The hard drive mp3 players plough through the batteries at a fast rate since the disk has to physically turn.

The memory based option uses a lot less battery power. Many of the memory based mp3 players use the AAA size battery, which is very convenient since you don't need a recharger, and you don't need to search for hard to find battery types.

Most hard drive versions use lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, and if you use your mp3 player a lot, your re-charger will be in regular use. Many people simply leave the power lead plugged in when they are at home.

If you want to use your player at the gym or while you're out jogging then you'll want the smallest player possible. There are some really tiny models on the market these days. You will usually have to sacrifice some storage with a very small mp3 player; but you can usually get enough music on there to have a good long workout. If you want to use your mp3 player more at home then size will not be such a great consideration.

The iPod allows you to play your music for a very long time (up to 12 hours for most of them), and they have a huge amount of storage (some have 80GB). You can store thousands songs within a standard iPod and have instant access to them wherever you are at the moment. This makes them a great choice for your music necessities.

With iPods, transferring music from a CD takes less than 5 seconds, assuming that you use the FireWire and USB 2.0 support; and it can be transferred in a wide variety of formats, such as MP3, WMA, or AAC.

With the iPod, users have the ability of importing songs from CDs, shuffling through songs, or choosing specific play lists.

As we all know, Apple's iPod has dominated the digital music player scene since its launch in 2001. As hard-drive-based players have gotten smaller, and the price of flashbased players has dropped, Apple seized on the opportunity to dive into the flash-based market with the iPod shuffle - and it was a wildly successful move. Apple has grabbed close to 46 percent of the flash-based player market since its inception. However, there were still many reasons for users not to get the shuffle—namely, the lack of a screen and sophisticated controls. The task for Apple was to create a music player that was somehow a marriage between the minute size of the iPod shuffle and the versatility of a regular iPod.

A brief word about sound quality: the iPod Nano uses the same audio codec (the WM8975) as the 4G iPods. The first and second generation iPods used the WM8721, while the 3G iPods and iPod mini used the WM8731L. Since the iPod Nano uses the same audio codech chip as the 4G, U2, and iPod photo players, its sound quality will be nearly identical to those other players.

Photos don't even convey how small and light the iPod Nano really is. At 3.5" x 1.6" x 0.27" and 1.5 ounces, it slips effortlessly into the coin pocket on a pair of jeans, with room to spare! It certainly makes the "thousand songs right in your pocket" example a reality; especially to women who have very little pocket space and are much more adverse to carrying bulkier electronics in those pockets than men. The iPod nano barely shows a profile in the pocket and it's easy to forget about its presence after carrying it around for awhile.

We are told that the "dock adapter" is meant to be to be used with future iPod accessories so that they will be able to connect to practically any new iPod. In a utopian world, this would mean that your new iPod would instantly be compatible with any new accessory that offered support for the "universal dock adapter." So don’t throw it away.

The most striking thing about this gadget is that it does not come with any real display. Yes, there is a small tri-color led to indicate its basic functionalities. The most important aspect of any iPod is its memory, and this tiny gizmo is endowed with 1GB of space – the best you can expect from such a slim device. When you compare this tiny thing with others, you would find that it is just a bit larger than the popular Nano's screen.

In music controls, you get a common ''scroll wheel'', which does not offer any scrolling functionalities?! Actually, you have to press down either on the top or bottom to adjust the volume. On the other hand, you have to press it on the right or left to move forward of backward with your tracks. If you press in the middle this will enforce pause. Its new docking mechanism allows you to plug in a USB dock to transfer all your favorite music .