Geekomon

The Quest for a mp3 player is a long an arduous one. A DAP, digital audio player, as the cool kids call it, is harder to find than anything! Anything! You could find a hetero in San Fran before you'd find a right DAP. Not that there's anything wrong with being San Fransiscan.

Here's my shopping journey. Maybe it'll help you avoid some of the pitfalls.

On Monday, the iternet says that 1 gb mp3 flash players were selling around 150 USD. I've got a hard-on now because I'm a tech-geek (also hadn't done me mornin' pee yet). With that in mind, I finally decided replaced my Old Bessie-Lou. My old flame, the unsinkable SONY DNE 510, was a $150 Mp3 CD player. Shut up. Its a Sony.
I thought that it would support Chinese/Japanese on the display: Wrong
I thought it had a backlight: Wrong

Sony Marketing can suck my dick. The 40 hours battery life, however, was fucking nice. Emphasis on the fucking.

Whenever I buy something I run up a list of questions--You should, too.
1.Does it support International ID3 tags on its display?

Unicode and Firmware. Most asian firms support Unicode.

2.How long is the length of the display?

The only thing that's worth reading is the track name so go by the exact length of the display. Manafacturers usually only state how many lines they support--4 lines is great but 4 lines with a length of 4 bits does not a sentence make.

3. Flash or HD?

HD has better GB per cost. Flash has a much better battery life. It's up to you really. Personally, I prefer flash players. They're lighter, no moving parts--so it wont skip or break, and they're but 20 times more expensive--yeah, you heard me. 20X. The exact price differs but it's 15x to 20x more expensive. Writing to flash is also slower too. HDs are only limited by the bus hole while flash is limited by the memory itself--Only 2 MB/s compared to god-knows-what. Let me place it in context.

1.
Flash takes 10 minutes to fill a 1 gigabyte mp3 Flash drive (USB 2.0)
Pocket Rocket does 20 Megabytes ps instead of 20megabits but mp3 players are too cheapass to design their usb to spec.

2.
HD takes 10 minutes to fill 4gigs. 6-8mb/s is nothing to scoff at.

Their are ways around this. SD Extreme Cards have 10MB writing speed. SD Extreme Ultra Rapefuckers have 20MB/s. So, an mp3 player with a built-in SD reader can be a good idea. If SD cards werent so prohibitively expensive. a 40x card can prolly be had for 80 bucks--That's 10mb/s. It'll take you 3 minutes to fill 1 gig up.

So in Summary, the type of player you by depends on what your going to use it for.

Going to the beach? Going to the gym? Doing some running? Revolve around your PC? Use NimH recharegeable AA/A batteries a lot? Want to buy something that'll last you nearly your whole life? Buy Flash. There are some caveats to this.

Drive around a lot? Go on airplane trips a lot? Dont want to deal with your computer that much? Want something inexpensive? Want a portable external Hard drive? Dont like plopping in batteries? Enjoy fast charges? Hard Drives.

I'm more a flash person mysef.


PART 2--> Now that I know what I want...Time to Google