Since things are still pretty slow in the Apple world right now, does anyone mind if we take a quick peek over the fence into the Land of Alleged iPod-Killers? As you well know, there have been dozens of devices tagged with that description over the past three years, and despite their arguably better feature sets and inarguably lower prices, not one of them has even come close to the iPod's market share (over 90 percent of all hard drive-based portable music players sold), so you'll forgive us if we're a little skeptical every time someone starts chiming in about how some new up-and-coming device is going to give the iPod a run for its money.

In fact, after so many wrong predictions about which players were going to clean the iPod's handy built-in clock, we're starting to think the pundits are on the verge of getting desperate and cautious at the same time. Case in point: faithful viewer Josh Lockie forwarded us a CNET article with the deliciously tentative title, "Will pocket-size Sony PC take on iPod?" It seems that the new Vaio U is a "full-fledged portable PC" that only weighs 1.2 pounds, has a snazzy 800x600 five-inch touchscreen, and just happens to have "all the capabilities of a hard disk-based audio player." Thus, "a buyer could treat it like a music player," although Sony is clear that it's not really marketing it as such.

Which is good, because it'd fail miserably in the role; for one thing, this freakin' whosis costs $2,000, which is probably just a little more than most people want to pay for an MP3 player-- or, these days, even a laptop. Mostly, though, there's the issue of size: at 6.6 inches by 4.3 inches, CNET describes the Vaio U as "nearly pocketable," which we'll translate as "not pocketable enough." The Vaio U may sell like hotcakes to people looking for the smallest, lightest notebook system they can get their freakishly diminutive mitts on (personally, we doubt it), but we can't in our wildest dreams-- yes, even the ones guest-starring a strangely receptive and slightly tipsy Alyson Hannigan-- imagine more than a few gadget geeks shelling out two grand and then splitting the seams of a pocket with one of these beasts to use it as a portable music player.

Heck, if you want to use history as a guide, you might recall another pricey "nearly pocketable" general-purpose handheld computer with a stylus-driven touchscreen, built-in communication tools, and the capability of running hundreds or thousands of third-party applications: it was called the Newton MessagePad, and it had its clock cleaned by the Palm Pilot, which was far less capable, but did just enough of what people wanted it to do and was cheaper, smaller, and lighter. In this market, portable music players, like PDAs, have got to be small to succeed. Period. And while some people might in fact try to use a Vaio U in place of a dedicated music player for a while, the notion that the product could "take on the iPod" is ludicrous.

That's not to say that it isn't one cool device with a geek-drool quotient of at least 120, provided you don't mind Windows XP. If Apple made a Mac OS X-based equivalent, we'd be all over it like that weird kid in your old kindergarten class running to eat the paste. But somehow we still think we'd be tossing it in a shoulder bag and listening to an iPod riding happily in a pocket with intact seams.