9. iPod Games and eBooks

The very first iPod model was all music, all the time ”unless you knew the secret Easter egg: the classic breakout Brick computer game, hidden from everyone who didn't know the sequence of button presses that could call it to the screen. Once the secret began to spread across the Internet, Apple's engineers admitted that the jig was up, and brought the game out into the open ”or at least into the Extras menu, under a command called Game.

On the 2003 iPod models, the Extras menu command changed from Game to Games, tripling the ways to kill time on the iPod. The Extras menu also picked up a whole new item: Notes. For the first time, the iPod became not just a music player, calendar, Rolodex, and game machine ”it also became an electronic book reader. (Don't worry if you have an older iPod model that doesn't have the new text-reading power; add-on shareware brings you the same feature.)