The Sunday Telegraph
When Sarah Sands relaunched the Sunday Telegraph in a £2m rebranding exercise, she attempted to snare a younger readership by comparing the new-look paper to "your iPod, containing all your favourite things". Not only did this fail to grasp the concept of an iPod, which is not actually capable of containing all of one's favourite things - there is, for example, no room for raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, not even on the 60Gb version - it was also something akin to your mum enticing you to eat your greens because "that crackhead Pete Doherty likes them". Thoroughly cringeworthy and, considering Sands got the bullet just nine months after getting the job, not entirely successful.
iPad
Measuring 380 sq ft, iPads are essentially tiny little flats, 25% smaller than an average 500 sq ft one-bedroom flat, but larger than a studio apartment, which will presumably be rechristened iPad Nanos before the week is up. Retailing between £80,000-£120,000, and not wholly dissimilar to rival property developer Wilson Bowden's discount housing scheme, which has the remarkably similar name i-Life, the iPad is aimed at those hoping to get a foot on the property ladder, or download a house, or whatever it is young people are doing nowadays.
By christening them "iPads" one imagines Barratt hoped to imply that their tininess is in some way a step towards modernity, and that they might appeal to the young and upwardly mobile. Crucially, Barratt claim that the iPad moniker is in no way a play on the word iPod. One has to wonder, though, why, once the similarity finally dawned on them, they didn't call it something a lot less like iPod. SomethingYouCanAfford, for example. Meanwhile, Bodyform is probably kicking itself for not copyrighting iPad as the sanitary towel of the iPod generation.
Born To Be Wide
Born to Be Wide is an Edinburgh club night, where the DJ booth is graced by luminaries of the Scottish music scene. This was enough for the NME to herald the night as "like an iPod of the arts scene". The logic here is that, like the iPod, Born to Be Wide allows you to have all your favourite bands in one place. The picky might be wont to point out that the crucial difference is the fact it is not so good at fitting into one's handbag.
Je Joue
Je Joue is the quite, quite appallingly named sex aid for women (to be honest, I'd be hard-stumped to think of a decently named sex aid, though the Hard-Stump isn't bad). Inevitably, it is apparently so technologically advanced that the people who nickname these things have nicknamed it "the iPod of vibrators". The Je Joue "quivers, glides and swirls over your most delicately sensitive areas in patterns of infinite variation for a truly thrilling experience". Its makers have called these patterns "grooves" and there are 10 to choose from, with names such as The Vixen, Sienna and Sunday Morning (which we imagine is not the same groove as the Velvet Underground song of the same name). It even has a little screen to show which track is playing at any one time. Why don't iPods just come with a vibrate function and then everyone would be happy?
Penguin
Not so long ago, the iconic Allen Lane-designed Penguin books led the style writer Stephen Bayley to declare that "the Penguin was the iPod of its day". Here, he is tapping into the essential must-have-ability factor exerted by the iPod. Nowhere is this more tangible than in commuterville, where the iPod's little white headphones communicate something akin to Lane's paperbacks: I am hip, modern, and cultured, they attempt to say. Sudoku and Now magazine just don't quite cut it by comparison.
www.linkedin.com
"LinkedIn is the iPod of social networking websites: beautifully designed, visited by tech-savvy business types and urbanistas, and with a deceptive ability to store a mass of information" one article claimed recently. Five years ago, the word iPod would have been substituted by Starbucks in this sentence, with no discernable difference. The main problem here is that LinkedIn is a website promoting social networks, and thus has no similarity whatsoever with the iPod. Or, indeed, Starbucks.
iBod airbrush tanning system
Arguably, iBod sits at the very bottom of the iPod-association barrel. Employing a soundalike is a little like hiring an Elton John lookalike to open your supermarket: quite immeasurably pointless. iBod is, in short, a fake tan spray grasping for credibility by associating itself with the hipster accessory du jour. Was probably formerly known as DVD airbrush tanning system.
The iRemote
This is, in essence, a remote control that operates like an iPod. Design student Chris Ambrose devised a buttonless TV remote that enables viewers to scroll through listings options by simply stroking it. Any similarity to the Je Joue is purely coincidental.
i-dog
When Hasbro invented a dancing plastic dog - and really, no home is complete without one, etc - they came up with the cunning ploy of ensuring said canine replica could be plugged into an iPod, so that with one fulsome cry of: "Dance little dog! Dance!" he would jiggle about to whatever tunes your iPod cared to play. The i-dog also boasted an additional feature of "developing a personality" in the manner of a Tamagotchi. Indeed, it is almost certain that the phrase "the Tamagotchi for the iPod generation" was bandied about to describe the toy. Despite the fact that an i-dog has an entertainment duration of a couple of Girls Aloud tracks, it still sold 4,000 a week in the lead-up to Christmas. But then, we live in a world where six million people buy James Blunt records. Crucially, the i-dog should not be confused with i-God, the phrase used to celebrate the Pontiff getting an i-Pod.
A-pod
As the online retailer Amazon eyes up the market currently monopolised by Apple's iTunes, it finds itself contemplating its own downloading service and, curiously, a rival to the iPod. Many are now referring to as the "aPod", presumably for want of imagination.
TUNiT
Adidas's TUNiT is apparently "the football boot for the iPod generation". Is the iPod generation aware it needs a football boot, one wonders? Anyway, what this bold claim means, we are led to understand, is that the TUNiT is a boot which can be customised to suit your style of play, in the same way you might choose to customise your iPod. Customising involves selecting your own uppers, chassis, studs and colour. Currently, it is customisable in 18 different ways, though by the end of the year there will be 57 different options to choose from. Quite what this has to do with the iPod, apart from showing an interesting policy on upper and lower case, is somewhat mystifying. To my mind it sounds far more like those LA Gear trainers with the fancy plaitable laces everyone wore for a brief while in the 1980s than a portable music device. But one doesn't like to quibble.
