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Sam Smith - Some time ago, my soon to be daughter-in-law - who does web design - convinced me it was time to get an MP3 player. I put my son and her on the plane and headed straight for Best Buy where I bought a Sandisk Fuze, with which I have been quite happy except when feeling insecure about not having an Ipod. My view of technology has always been that it is there to simplify your life, not make it more complicated and so I tend to avoid devices that will allow me to do wonderful things that I have no intention of doing or constantly try to get me to upgrade things I haven't even figured out in their more primitive formulation.
To my amazement, I discovered today that I had an ally, namely the high priest of tech toys, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. His comments on MP3 players sound like something I would write if I weren't afraid at being scorned by everyone with earphones rising out of their shirt pocket. Interestingly, a number of Boing Boing readers spoke well of the Sandisk players, including the Fuze. So there may be hope for me yet.
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing - What MP3 player should I buy? I'm in the market for a new MP3 player -- my second-gen iPod Nano is finally dead, and I don't want to buy another iPod, or any other player with DRM built in. I figure that any company that wants to devote its engineers to figuring out how to frustrate my desires doesn't really want my business.
Who'd got a suggestion? I'm looking for something:
- small (Nano-sized or smaller),
- low-capacity (8GB is fine, all I use it for is podcasts),
- chargeable and connectable with a standard USB cable,
- reasonably rugged,
- with an LCD,
- capable of marking some files as podcasts or audiobooks and remembering where you stopped playing them, and,
- most importantly, I'm looking for something that can be connected to a set of lanyard headphones like these
I don't care if it has WiFi or Bluetooth, or if it plays games, or if it has a "store" on the net that lets me get music for it directly. I just want a chunk of solid-state storage with a headphone jack and a decent menuing system and headphones I can wear around my neck so that they don't get tangled in things. Suggestions?
To my amazement, I discovered today that I had an ally, namely the high priest of tech toys, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. His comments on MP3 players sound like something I would write if I weren't afraid at being scorned by everyone with earphones rising out of their shirt pocket. Interestingly, a number of Boing Boing readers spoke well of the Sandisk players, including the Fuze. So there may be hope for me yet.
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing - What MP3 player should I buy? I'm in the market for a new MP3 player -- my second-gen iPod Nano is finally dead, and I don't want to buy another iPod, or any other player with DRM built in. I figure that any company that wants to devote its engineers to figuring out how to frustrate my desires doesn't really want my business.
Who'd got a suggestion? I'm looking for something:
- small (Nano-sized or smaller),
- low-capacity (8GB is fine, all I use it for is podcasts),
- chargeable and connectable with a standard USB cable,
- reasonably rugged,
- with an LCD,
- capable of marking some files as podcasts or audiobooks and remembering where you stopped playing them, and,
- most importantly, I'm looking for something that can be connected to a set of lanyard headphones like these
I don't care if it has WiFi or Bluetooth, or if it plays games, or if it has a "store" on the net that lets me get music for it directly. I just want a chunk of solid-state storage with a headphone jack and a decent menuing system and headphones I can wear around my neck so that they don't get tangled in things. Suggestions?
1 Comments:
I won't give you a suggestion as to brand, but I will suggest that there is no reason to feel inadequate because you don't use an IPod.
There are other brands which are more advanced in terms of both technical and audio quality, but that said I would also point out that audio quality is more dependent on the buds or phones you use. Another consideration is age -- none of us hear the way we used to, and high audio quality can be overkill for aging sound receptors. Especially for those who have abused their ears in the past. Having a decent equalizer can help overcome frequency specific issues.
I would suggest that you go somewhere that you can handle a number of MP3 players. That they are ergonomic for your hands. Checking to see which ones bookmark is just a lookup on the net, but how the player handles for you is something you can only determine by trying it.
Your needs are your needs.
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