Apple’s competitors have yet to make a dent in iPod sales. Sure, outfits like Creative and Dell make nifty digital players. In fact, people claim that competitively priced players like Dell’s DJ and Creative’s Zen Micro are better than the iPod. However, iPod is what people think when they want to take their music with them. What’s more, no matter what device that person sitting next to you is jamming to, chances are you’ll think “iPod.”

Apple continues to make headlines whenever it upgrades or introduces a new iPod. During the past 12 months, Apple’s press machine grabbed premium, above-the-fold space when introducing the iPod Mini, the U2 iPod, and the iPod Shuffle. Meanwhile, the only people who can tick off the names of competing products like iRiver or Samsung’s digital player are those who make them, sell them or own them. For some reason, rocking with the Samsung YH-925 Audio/Photo File Player just doesn’t sound nearly as cool as owning an iPod Photo.

Then there’s the inevitable backlash whenever something becomes popular, and the iPod is no exception. Already, people are complaining about other people using iPods in public, such as on buses, subways and airplanes, in much the same way that people complain about other people gabbing on their cell phones in public.

“Walk through any U.S. airport these days, and you will see person after person gliding through the social ether as if on auto-pilot,” syndicated columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote. “Get on a subway, and you’re surrounded by a bunch of Stepford commuters, all sealed off from each other, staring into mid-space as if anaesthetized by technology. Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t over-hear, don’t observe. Just tune in and tune out.”

Since Sullivan is a self-admitted iPod person, you can imagine how people who don’t own iPods feel whenever they see someone wearing a set of Earbuds.

Of course, they said pretty much the same things about people addicted to Walkmans when Sony rolled out the first personal music player more than 20 years ago.

However, Sony pretty much dropped the ball when it introduced its own line of digital players, mainly because the products weren’t capable of playing anything but tracks purchased from the Sony Connect store. Sony recently introduced several new “digital Walkmans,” and unlike the company’s first effort, Sony’s new players are MP3 friendly. However, Sony still insists on making its ATRAC digital rights management format the only proprietary format the digital Walkmans can play, thereby ignoring all those online stores that traffic in songs encoded in Microsoft’s popular WMA format.

But then the iPod can’t handle WMA files either. However, Apple has the distinct advantage of being first in the marketplace with both an online store and a personal player. Sony waited well over a year to play catch-up. Way too long for a company intending on setting a standard of its own.

But if you can’t be a leader, why not be a copier? Reports coming out of CeBIT, the mammoth consumer electronics convention in Germany, say that a Taiwanese manufacturer by the name of LuxPro debuted a product that looked almost identical to the iPod Shuffle. Supposedly, LuxPro removed their product after Apple complained, only to put it back on display shortly before the convention closed.

Perhaps the real sign that it’s an iPod world is the news out of Wisconsin where state legislators are mulling over a sales tax on music downloads. While the proposed tax would include video and software downloads as well as music, no one’s calling it a video tax or a software tax. Instead, the local media is referring to it as an “iPod tax.”

Now that’s name recognition.