I actually think it’s a very good thing for the Home Office to be giving out 20 video iPods for work purposes (as reported in The Times). It’s a perfectly valid method to distribute ‘e-learning’, via bitesize chunks of video content. I bet it’s more efficient than gathering senior staff into a conference suite somewhere, several times a year – and realistically, £9,000 is a blip in the overall budget.
Would critics prefer that staff brought their own iPods in from home, and charged them up with work-based content via the office network (and GSI)? Ask the IT managers if they’d be happy with the implications of doing so. In a lot of places, it’s a gross misconduct offence.