It happens eventually to every wildly successful product - the product name becomes synonymous with other products in the same category. So all tissues are Kleenex, all copiers are Xeroxes and so on. Until now, though, iPod seemed to mean only iPod. If someone called a non-Apple mp3 player an iPod they'd have been looked upon sadly by those in the know.
Until now. Today's New York Times Bits blog has a post titled Amazon Pitches a Wireless iPod for Books. I clicked the link to see what this was all about. Reading books on the iPod Touch maybe? No, the word iPod was being used in a very generic sense - not as mp3 player so much as handheld wireless device.
When your grandchildren ask you some day why a whole class of handheld devices are called iPods, you can tell them that it all started on a dark and stormy night in November 2007.