Ipods

What about a playstation portable?I think you can get them in the US for $250 not looked hard but arn't Ipods more?Not only listen to music,watch video,play games"with almost the power of ps2"store files,photographs,mpeg,mp3,USB 2.0,firewire,bluetooth,it last's 3 hours playing the most demanding games,so it will last ages just playing music,its bigger but it does a whole load more.

 

4-5 albums is pretty small, so you won't need a big mp3 player. The flash mp3 players would probably work for you (512M-1G). The great thing about flash players is that there are no moving parts so it should last you for a long time (comparably to the larger iPod mega-gig sizes which are hard drives). Some flash players also allow you to replace the flash memory.

Also (someone correct me here) I believe flash players have a much longer battery life span.

iPod is average, expensive, and does the basic stuff. Super easy to use and has good audio playback. You may want to go to the apple.com site and check out the iPod forums because there have been many praises and complaints.

Personally I would not get an iPod since there are other players that just "do more" at a cheaper price.

 

These are some of the ones that I am looking at, I like the 20gig one
http://www.cowonamerica.com
http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/m3/

Here are a few more that are good.

http://www.iriveramerica.com/

prolly my fave, also will prolly get this one. myself for my bike rides to work.
http://www.iriveramerica.com/prod/ultra/700/ifp_795.aspx

http://creative.com/products/welcome.asp?category=213

Hope that this helps out some, also check out c:Net they do a pretty good review of some of the new ones.

George

 

I do have to say that they do make a decent product, but I just can not get past that they are still made by apple, I have bad feelings twords the mac.

 

Very pleased with my ipod although it occassionally crashes and has to reset itself (not getting wiped and losing everything) but can get quite annoying, especially having to redo your settings. Anyone else get this?
Yeh they're good products and if you get one would recommend a case with it. JustPlayin summed it all up very well in his post, just what I would've said.

 

What I don't like about the iPod Shuffle is that there is no way to remove the internal Lithium Ion battery, so if it dies then you cannot change it yourself easily, and Apple are renowned for their extreme service pricing.

The PlayStation Portable is pretty good, with the only couple of things I don't like are that because it has such as huge screen (amazing graphics) then it would chew up a lot of battery power, it uses generic Sony Memory Stick, and being a Sony it's expensive. It's not the product to buy if listening to music is your main requirement.

 

Mine didn't come with an ac charger, but I got a usb and firewire cable and a plug adapter so the firewire cable plugs into the plug adapter and then into your ipod.

 

Personally, I would go for a Creative Zen Micro.

It comes in ten colours, front mounted controls, touch sensitive control strip, great menu, FM radio, and an organiser enabling syncing of contacts, tasks and calender from Outlook.

Also has a 5 GB, 1 in hard drive and an excellent 35 x 23 mm LCD screen which is well lit.

Battery lasts about 11 hours, which is longer than the iPod Mini and the Zen Micro recharges itself over its USB 2.0 connection, but also comes with an AC adaptor and the battery is user-replaceable.

Unlike the iPod family, the Zen Micro supports WMA music format and syncs with Windows Media Player 10 as well as supporting DRM.

 

Just to clarify, the ipod also charges when connected to the pc via firewire and usb 2.0/1.1 whichever your motherboard has.