You’re probably wondering if portable music players will go to the way of the audio cassette, thanks to increasingly music-capable cell phones. Not quite. Dedicated audio players are far from obsolete.
MP3 Players fall into two main categories: Hard Drive and Flash Memory. Hard Drive players range from 3GB to 100GB, though most fall in the 8GB to 30GB range. Some newer flash players – one example is the SanDisk Sansa e270, which takes a swipe at the iPod with SanDisk’s iSheep campaign (www.idont.com) – currently top out at 6GB. But most players fall in the 512MB to 4GB range.
Chipsets are also evolving, especially in the flash player space. Though today’s flash players now play black video, they currently max out at 15 frames per second. Manufacturers may try to beef up their chipsets to handle 30-fps video, which would help smooth the jerkiness of video at 15fps, but watching video on a tiny 1.5inch screen is still not ideal.
Hard drive players used to have better features (and more of them) than Flash players, but that’s no longer the case. Even the tiniest Flash players now include FM tuners, voice/FM/line-in recording and photo viewing. A few players – both Flash and Hard drive – also have media card slots, giving you potentially unlimited storage.
Which sounds better? Two important factors are frequently response and output power. In testing, I generally find that both Flash and Hard drive players have flat frequency responses except in the bass, where they both usually have some weakness. Headphones, however, significantly influence how a player sounds. The earbud bundled with most players are terrible and I almost always recommend upgrading.
Today’s MP3 players include a bewildering variety of displays. OLED screens are now fairly common, but while they save battery life and have perfect viewing angles, they aren’t nearly as high resolution as LCDs.
Screen size seems to have settled down to roughly 1.5inches for Flash players and 2.5inches for Hard drive players. Photos and very short video clips are fine on the smallest screens, but longer clips and TV shows are definitely more watchable on 2.5inches.
Another important consideration is whether your player supports your music subscription service: iPods work only with the iTunes Music Store and Players that carry the Microsoft PlaysForSure logo work (or should work) with download and subscription services like MTV’s Urge, Napster, and Yahoo! Music Unlimited.
Sometime next year we’re going to see even more features integrated into MP3 Players, such as Bluetooth headphone support, more sophisticated recording capabilities and new interfaces like the one Apple is rumored to be developing for the iPod Wireless transfer is available via devices such as the MusicGremlin MG1000, but will be much more prevalent. And as Flash memory prices drop, we’ll see greater capacities at lower prices, which will eventually spell the end of low-capacity (8GB less) hard drive players.
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Tags: flash memory, Ipod, mp3, mp3 player, music
