Creative had an mp3 player that was shaped like a portable CD player [1]. I guess the idea was that it was a form factor that people were already comfortable with. If you're looking for a reason why Apple ended up on top of the portable mp3 market, this example always seemed to sum it up for me. Apple has its faults, but (with reference to the fake Henry Ford quote) it's never been the sort of company that sold its customers faster horses.
Ooh, I had one of those in high school, saved up for months! I loved that thing - lots of space, it read song info from the files, supported playlists and had space for dozens of albums! DOZENS! Admittedly it ate 4 AA batteries in as many hours, but who cares? It was just as big as a discman, but SO MUCH MORE AWESOME. Used it every day on the school bus.
I kinda wanted an iPod when they came out, but as I grew up in a strict Dos & Windows home, that was out of the question.
They must have offered a few versions of the Nomad, cuz mine was crap. And oh dear $deity, the software for loading it up from Windows had a terrible UI, no flexibility in organizing songs...
The bundled software was always crappy. Luckily the protocol was simple and people reverse engineered it quickly. I used some linux command line tool to manage files on it.
The Nomad was pretty much just a rebranded Samsung Yepp YP-D40.
It had 64MB of flash storage and a parallel port connector compared to the 5GB and Firewire 400 that the iPod had, the Nomad/Yepp YP-D40 was fairly decent compared to a lot of the crap that was out there, but it didn't deserve a premium price.
Perhaps you should compare the iPod to the Nomad Jukebox line from around the iPod's release, instead of the Nomad 1 from the 90's.
Jukebox 1 had 6GB storage, USB 1.1, and came out nearly a year before iPod 1. Jukebox 2 came out the following year, had 30GB storage, and used USB 2.0.
