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My household has killed several iPods with hard drives, I recently bought a Nano and love it. I will never fill up the 8 gigs and don't watch videos.
I say give her the Nano, she will love you even more.

I'm in the camp of "buy the largest capacity iPod you can afford" as I have a LOT of music. Originally, I got a 30GB iPod from one of those freeipods.com sites, but exchanged it for the 60GB model. Just recently, I've filled it to capacity and I'm now considering a bigger one at some point.

Reason for me is that I listen to my iPod all day at work and another 3-4 hours a week at the gym. My wife uses it on occasion as well, so it is well-used. One day I might want to listen to jazz at work, but also want a rock mix during my workout. I also keep music for my daughter on my iPod for road trips.

Long story short, I like having ALL of my music with me. I've had my iPod for about 3 years now, and not had any big problems. I've had the occasional reboot (maybe 2 times so far) and the hard drive never skips while I'm working out.

How big is your CD collection? If you have hundreds of disks you plan on importing then you might as well forget about getting something small if you want to fit it all onto an IPod.

if you have 2,000 song library or less then you can probably get away with an 8 gig nano and thats assuming you don't want to load the thing up with video. Basically when you are talking nano and video its good to throw a movie or two on but mainly I think the biggest function of the video was meant to be TV show episode and video podcasts. You sync up a few episodes of something onto the nana to watch on a given day but mostly its just music.

If you want TONS of video available all the time and your entire 5k+ song music library available all the time then you need a classic simply for the space. My wife would easily get by with an 8 gig nano but thats my wife.

I would say space needs should be your primary concern. If you get any modern ipod assuming you don't run out of space it will probably last you (feature wise) for a good 3+ years. Really depends on where they go with future iPods and features. I've had a 20 Gig ipod (model right before the video ipod) for years now and it still does all I need it to do. Granted I "wish" it would do video but i'm not rich and I don't "need" it to do video.

My fiancee got a video iPod saying the same thing, that it would be cool to watch video on it.  I think she has done so only a few times.  It just is not worth it with the small screen unless you spend a lot of time on a train or flying.  I could maybe see someone watching it in the car, but even that is iffy.

In terms of NPR podcasts, I listen to CarTalk religiously.  The episodes are roughly 54:30 in length and about 25 MB.  Oodles of room for podcasts on the 8 gig nano.

I just got a 4 gig nano and love its small size.  Used in conjunction with the Nike+ shoes to record my runs.

Thanks  everyone.  Just ordered a refurbished 4gig 3rd Gen nano from from the Apple Store online for $180 with the Apple Care Protection plan!  Her birthday is Monday, so hopefully I'll get it in time to download some stuff from our friends house in time.

I stopped by Best Buy to get my hands on one of these things and was blown away.  I've been in my G3 for too long!

Dante

I like that!  Until she fell in love with an ipod, I had trouble convincing her to stay with Macs and that all our computer issues are because it is an old machine and, yes, Macs are more expensive, but they are better...and you try getting 10 years out of a PC from 1998!!  But since she is back in school, she wants mobility and was ready to just by a $900 Dell laptop.  But then the ipod came and I think she did some reading and is now set on a Mac Book.  (I'm not sure she knows that ipods can run off a PC now?)  Anyway, I was all cued up to order a Mac mini to replace our trusty G3, so now I'm dropping another 5-600 for the laptop.  I don't think I'll mind.

Birthday is MOnday and I'll drop a line to report how it went.

Final chapter, for anyone interested.

She loves it!  The shipment arrived on Friday and so I was able to download a podcast and some photos of the kids from my PC at work before I left.  But she's still enjoying the games that came with it!  She hasn't made it to her friends yet to download music, but in time...  No problems about what I got; she likes the fact I saved money on a refurb and 4 gig is plenty memory for us right now.  And silver is the color she wanted best, without knowing that is the only color the 4 gig comes in!  Like an expectant mom, she bought these ipod/mp3 player speakers at Target last week, and we hooked that up and it works great.  And the kids love the fact that Mom got her iPod.  She had even knitted an iPod cozy (yes, I like the expectant mother analogy)

So I did good this birthday!

thanks!

In case anyone has been wondering...we got a MacBook in June and my wife is like a total Mac junkie now!  It all started with a nano.  Now we also have a Touch and my son got a shuffle with money he saved.  (He's 8)  And now with the MacBook we are all enjoying the home computer like we never did before.  Our kids have been introduced to Bugs Bunny, for instance.  And the iPods have been great for in the car with them too!

Thanks to everyone for their advice!  Merry Christmas!

Dante

13" MacBook (original); 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo; 2GB RAM

G3 beige desktop; 233MHz; 160MB RAM