Could be tough area to keep up with but after receiving a fantastic pair of Etymotic earphones http://www.etymotic.com/ I had to get an MP3 player to make the best use of them ! I had been putting it off for ages since the memory size is going up, the price is coming down but music downloads are hot hot hot !
So an ipod would be great but way pricey and I wanted something that was at least a bit "disposable" so if I left it on an airplane I wouldn't be too upset. So what were the other alternatives ?
Most are smaller silicon based, use USB port connectivity, integrate with WMP and under 512mb storage. Iriver had a 1.5Gb device for $250 but frankly the rio range had that right mix of features plus cool design and were 256mb plus upgradable with an SD card.
Some looked like my favorite jump drive (another fav) and actually performed pretty much the same function like portable memory, other were ipod rip offs and the creative lab was nicely featured but looked a bit cold and clunky.
The Cali ( $199 ) was the one I opted for. 256mb memory (upgradable to 512mb), USB (1.0 unfortunately) connectivity and WMP inter-op, cool wee device.
It'll be interesting to find out whether I will get frustrated by the memory size and how often I'll need to switch tunes in and out of the device. My guess is not too much, I have 50 Gb of music on my PC and find I listen to three or four playlists 90% of the time. I can't see shuffling through the much smaller user interface to hunt through a gazillion songs even if I had gigs and gigs of storage - but we'll see - I'll have to ask an ipod owner !
Posted by adrian at November 15, 2003 11:42 PM | TrackBack