Musical memories for a new generation.

• Position: What's New?

Among the fondest memories from our college days are the times we spent making mixed tapes. Music was such a large part of campus life and, in many ways, it defined us. We invested hours upon hours poring through the albums of our dormmates until we came up with the perfect collection, which we recorded on a 60-minute cassette, and then popped it in a Walkman. We'd hook this device to our belt, headphones in tow, and we'd be good to go.

Obviously, technology has changed a bit in the last 20-plus years, but our quest remains the same. We no longer may live with a couple hundred other people with milk crates filled with LPs, but we have access to even more songs. Thanks to our new iPod Nano ($199, 4GB), we are able to store up to 1,000 songs in the slim (one-quarter inch thick) media player. We can download music, best-sell ing audiobooks, movies, TV shows, games, and podcasts from the iTunes Store, or import music from CDs. In fact, we can create exactly what we want to take with us on any given day. We just need to connect the iPod nano to a Mac or PC and iTunes transfers everything in one seamless sync. If we've somehow selected more than the iPod's capacity, we have the ability to drag and drop exactly what we want from our iTunes...