Choosing which MP3 player to buy can sometimes be confusing amid the hype and choice in today’s market. Furthermore, do you want to go with a solid state flash player which currently can hold a couple of hundreds songs or do you want to get a player that can store your CD collection?
So, let’s look, in no particular order, at some of the most popular players in the flash and hard disk categories.
<b>Solid state star
Apple is still the kingpin of the portable music empire. 50 million Ipods have been sold throughout the world since its launch over two years ago. Its biggest selling flash player is the Ipod Nano available in one, two and four Gbyte sizes. It has a 1.5” colour display, allowing you to browse up to 25,000 photos. The battery lasts up to 14 hours (depending on what you’re using it for) and can be charged up to 80% capacity in an hour and a half; a full charge takes around three hours.
Hard to beat
Top of the heap in the hard disk category is the Ipod in 30 or 60Gb versions so you can choose 7,500 or 15,000 songs and up to 150 hours of video on a 2.5” 320 x 240-pixel QVGA colour display. The new generation Ipods are thinner than their predecessors coming in at half an inch ‘thin’. The 60Gb Ipod offers up to 20 hours of music playback between charges, and the 30Gb model will give you 14 hours. The Ipod battery can be charged up to 80% capacity in three hours; a full charge takes about five hours.
Get Creative
Creative has some of the most popular devices in the country and have certainly been at the forefront of pushing the envelope for MP3 devices. Its Zen Nano Plus is the company’s top selling flash player available in 512Mb or 1Gb versions with line-in encoding for direct connection to any audio source, so you can bypass your computer and record music directly from your CD player. It also includes an FM tuner and voice recorder.
For hard disk based it’s hard to top the Zen Vision M. This gadget was voted best in show at CES 2006. With a 30Gb capacity allowing around 15,000 songs and 100-120 hours of video the Zen Vision M supports all major music, video and photograph formats. It has a 2.5” screen and displays images at 320×240. In addition it has an FM radio and built in microphone.
Iriver making a splash
Since its introduction into the Irish market the Iriver line of MP3 players have been selling very strongly. Its H10 20Gb hard disk player is among its most popular devices and has all the features you’d expect from a top of the range MP3 player such as the FM radio and built in microphone.
Its T20 1GB flash player has a USB stick design with voice recording and like many players on the market it’s DRM (digital rights management) compatible and has an FM tuner.
One of Europe’s true electronic giants, Philips has also been savvy in the MP3 space its hard disk and flash series are consistently highly rated among users.
The Philips HDD 6320 30GB holds around 8,000-9,000 songs with a 9-10 hours battery life as with all these higher range player it supports video and photos.
Philips GoGear 1GB flash player will store 400-500 songs and give you 10-12 hours of battery life per charge. No FM radio on this one, or pictures or video. It does, however, have a built-in microphone.
Old reliable
Sony was synonymous with mobile music in the 80s with the introduction of the Walkman. While other companies have superseded them in the mobile music category the company is still turning out popular players on the market.
According to Sony its flash rage is growing massively which is in keeping with how the market is expanding. Its NEW00 and the NEW005 has a lithium-ion rechargeable battery which should give you 30 hours of play time. When the battery dies it has a high speed battery charge where a speedy three minute power boost will give you a reasonable three hours playback time. This 2Gb device will let you squeeze about 90 CDs worth of music onto it.
Sony’s biggest selling hard disk device is currently the 6Gb NWA1000 but that’s soon to be replaced by the 8Gb NWA1200 for in and around the same price point. The NWA100 weighs in at 109g and is available in various colours. Battery life is in the region of 20 hours and is rechargeable via AC adaptor and USB connection.
Climbing the charts
Other popular players on the market would include Sandisk and Cowon. While having a tighter hold in the UK, these two companies are making inroads into the Irish market. Sandisk’s Sansa E200 Series MP3 players are the flagship products of its audio line. This flash-based player provides music, photos, and video clip playback and a 1.8” TFT colour screen with navigational features. The Sansa E200 supports Microsoft PlaysForSure subscription music standard.
Cowon’s Iaudio X5L (Long Play) 20Gb device allows a massive 35 hours of battery life. It comes equipped with a 160 x 128 dot, 260,000 colours TFT-LCD.
Toshiba’s Gigabeat S has been hailed as an “Ipod killer”, but we’ve heard that before. Anyway, this 30Gb model runs Microsoft’s portable media centre. It comes with a video player, FM tuner and 2.4” QVGA screen. Mac users can forget about this one as it only works with Windows XP PCs. No European launch date yet but it should be over here relatively soon.
And then there’s the add-ons…
There’s an incredible amount of accessories for all MP3 player brands. Most popular are speakers. This will usually enable you to dock a player and listen to it through reasonably powerful speakers somewhere around the eight watt range.
Cases and skins are also flying out of the shops – protecting the screen is essential if your device plays video. Neck straps and power adaptors sell well while Bluetooth headphones are beginning to increase in popularity. FM transmitters are illegal in Ireland but can be sourced online and will allow you to tune your player to a radio frequency to broadcast over, for example, a car radio.
Come on down to the download ball
One of the few Irish music download sites, the Eircom Music Club has over 73,000 registered users and there are currently 1.2 million tracks available to listen to on the site.
Although 3 Ireland has no figures for the Republic, in the UK it had one million music downloads in April alone.
Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ got to number one in the UK via digital downloads (before the record was released at retail). One in five of those downloads were on 3 UK.
3 Sweden’s online music store outsells Apple’s Itunes music store by a factor of 6:1, and 3 Sweden’s music offering makes more revenue that all of the country’s operators and online music stores combined.
3’s research suggests that 50% of all digital music is sold through mobiles.
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