Spat asks why Microsoft doesn’t make a bigger deal about the SmartPhones when it comes to the iPod. I love my SmartPhone as much as the next guy, but you can’t compare that to the iPod. Here’s why: my son will not consider buying one. A cell phone has a monthly service charge. An iPod doesn’t. Also, an iPod is “cool” but a SmartPhone isn’t. There’s a variety of reasons for that.

By the way, I really dislike it when Microsoft employees post blogs but don’t put their names on their blogs (or their email aliases). Why? Cause I wanted to email Splat something internally, and I can’t. Please, please, please use your real name on your blogs and put your email address out there. Or don’t blog.

To make things even worse, I used the contact link on Spat’s blog, but my email was rejected by Microsoft’s spam filters. Sigh.

Back to the iPod. I brought home one of the older Portable Media Centers for my son to try out. He has been playing with it all day. Says “why didn’t you make a bigger deal about this, if you had, I would have considered one of these instead of an iPod.” What turned him on? He burned a CD onto both his 20GB iPod and the Windows Media Center. The Windows Media Center sounds noticeably better. Tomorrow we’re going to try some experiments to figure out whether it’s the headphones that come with both units, the format/compression, or the unit itself, but he’s right, his new iPod doesn’t sound as good.

I think we should do a podcast together tomorrow too, since he’s become quite the podcasting expert (he even told Woz about various podcasts that Woz didn’t know about).

Update: thanks to Jojjo, who pointed out that Spat is Steve Patrick. I still wish he would have that on his home page somewhere. Blogging is a very powerful relationship-building tool. How can anyone build a relationship with Steve if they have to dig through old posts to find his email and name?