How "shock proof" is the iPod? I would be using it in occasionally extreme situations that could shake it up quite a bit. Does it have a large buffer?

It has a huge buffer (it's got 16 meg of RAM and the software is probably much smaller than the Empeg software). I imagine it's not all that shock-proof when it is caching -- there's no space in it for shock absorbers à la car-player -- although presumably the makers of the 1.8in drives it uses are even more aware of shock issues than the makers of 2.5in drives.

Peter