Awwwwwww, it's just an eentsy-beents! To the utter surprise of absolutely nobody (except Albert "Thunderstruck Al" Sherman of Booneville, PA, who was also shocked to learn that he didn't win the lottery and that water is wet), Uncle Steve today announced the iPod mini, which we're probably going to keep referring to as the miniPod just because we think it sounds better. Whaddaya know? Sometimes strong feelings come true. Or truish, anyway.

For those of you who followed all the rumors, yes, it's cheaper; yes, it's smaller; yes, it's available in colors (though not in stripes). No, it's not Flash RAM-based, which only comes as a surprise to the brilliant predictive mind of analyst Rob Enderle, who's now batting something like 0 for 3,483 when it comes to Apple prognostications. On the plus side for good ol' Rob, though, there's a decent chance that the miniPod announcement will spawn another Enderlicious prediction, most likely one about how the new device will fail miserably because it's too expensive and packs a 4 GB hard drive instead of 256 MB of that Flash RAM that he's so darn crazy about.

The thing is, if he does say that, we'll be in a bit of a pickle, because we won't be able to disagree-- at least, not to our accustomed level of mouth-frothing stridency. While we were always a little skeptical that Apple would ever ship something good enough to call an iPod at that magical $99 price point that got tossed around in the press so blithely over the past couple of weeks, we hadn't ruled out a miracle, and we had at least hoped for a $149 2ish GB option. Instead Apple seems to have drawn a line in the sand and decided that anything less than a thousand songs in your pocket just isn't an iPod, and so only the rumored high-end miniPod surfaced-- at $249, which is fifty smackers more than most people had been expecting.

Now, here's the thing: if there had never been an iPod in the first place and Apple announced the $249 4 GB miniPod today, we'd be jumping up and down and hugging strangers in the street, assuming they didn't look too gross or anything. But considering that a mere fifty clams more gets you a full-fledged 15 GB iPod, we're not at all sure just how many people will be lining up to plunk down a quarter-grand for only a quarter of the disk space. Presumably it'll be people who 1) have small music collections, 2) like aluminum but hate plastic, 3) love shiny metallic colors but detest white, and 4) have trouble lifting five to six ounces but feel they can manage 3.6 okay.

That said, we just held up a half-inch stack of business cards (which is exactly the width of a miniPod and only a tenth of an inch shorter), and we have to say, dang, that's one small iPod. Especially with 4 GB of breathing room, which means it holds 80% of what our original iPods hold, and actually does more in terms of extras and the like. In other words, this could well be one of those products whose specs don't necessarily look all that great on paper, but when you hold one, your wallet seems to leap unbidden from your pants. Sort of like the original iPod, actually; you may recall that we were pretty lukewarm about the whole thing at first, and boy did that ever change.

So there's the miniPod story: a ridiculous amount of function in a likewise ridiculously tiny package, all for what is (when you think about it) a ridiculously fair price for what you get. Sure, if you don't mind lugging around a hulking behemoth of a gleaming white plastic thing, you can pack four times as much music into its big brother for only $50 more, but for some people even a thousand songs will seem like overkill, and the physical size factor may be a real issue; the iPod is portable, whereas the miniPod is barely there at all. And if the price bums you out, well, who knows? The "insider info" about the entry-level 1.5 GB miniPod may well have been real after all; Apple could be keeping it in the wings, ready to take on the low-end Flash-based players (that other 31% of the market, for those of you who watched the Stevenote) at a later date. Like, when 4 GB miniPod sales start to level off. Geez, we may even have to start saving up just in case.