Is the new click wheel sealed? You may do better looking for the older generation with all touch buttons. Of course, that always sounded awful to actually use, but I never tried one.

Now, how much sand are you really going to be exposed to if you're staying within the "Green Zone"? It was my impression that it was downtown Baghdad, not really the middle of the desert.

I'm extremely happy with my Karma. I havn't had a problem with it yet, and it's got many of the great empeg features. (It's great when you press the menu button and hold it a seccond time just to see if it'll take you back down to where you were in the playlist tree, only to find that it does exactly that...)

Matthew