The best portable music players...for grown-ups

[RommelS]

Source: ZDnet.com

The best portable music players...for grown-ups
David Coursey
(02/07/2003)

I don't like stand-alone MP3 players. It seems to me that an electronic gizmo should, whenever possible, do more than just one thing--whether that one thing is making phone calls, tracking appointments, or playing music.
I'm thinking about this because I've just seen a video in which my buddy Brian Cooley, of CNET Radio Direct, talks to Eliot Van Buskirk, of CNET Reviews, about how to buy an MP3 player. But I want to do even better and recommend a few devices that will play MP3s, but also do real work. In other words: MP3 players for grown-ups

I admit that some of these do-it-all devices can get pretty gimmicky. Why, I wonder, should a digital camera also be an MP3 player? "Because it can," isn't a good answer. Multitasking devices should be created for a reason, not simply because some product manager said, "Hey, why not?"

That said, here are some of your best multitalented options.

Pocket PC devices
Windows Media Player and a headphone jack are standard parts of every Pocket PC handheld and Pocket PC Phone Edition combo device. Back when memory for these devices was limited, and add-on memory modules cumbersome and expensive, these MP3 capabilities were just a curiosity.

But newer Pocket PCs have built-in memory slots, and the cost of memory has come down dramatically. Those two factors mean it's easy to carry several cards with you for hours of music on the road. And if you use Microsoft's Windows Media format rather than MP3 to store your tunes, you'll get significantly more storage on every card.

Note that there's more to portable audio than MP3 files: Pocket PCs and iPods also support the player used by Audible for its downloadable audio books, which are the main things I actually listen to on my iPAQ 3870.

Palm devices
There have been add-on MP3 devices for Palm PDAs for several years now. Most were so expensive, it probably would have made more sense just to buy a Pocket PC. That has begun to change, though Palm still seems to come up a little short in the music department.

New Palm OS 5 devices, such as the Tungsten, support MP3 playback. But, inexplicably, Palm doesn't include a music player with either the device or the OS. The company has promised a player. But leaving it out at the release date is the sort of sloppiness that has cost Palm market share.

Sony, whose share of the PDA market is growing, has the music thing down cold. Both the CLIE PEG-NX70V and the new NZ90 support MP3 and Sony's ATRAC3 sound files. This makes the CLIEs my hands-down favorite Palm-compatible music players.

If you want to make calls and listen to tunes on a single Palm device, you might still be able to find the Samsung Uproar, a cellular phone from a few years back that also played MP3s. Or you could consider the Kyocera 7135 smart phone, which includes an MP3 player with its Palm PDA features.

There are also phones that accept MP3 player add-ons, like the Sony Ericsson T68i. But I've never seen an add-on that really rang my chimes, so I'm hesitant to recommend that approach. A better option might be a Pocket PC Phone Edition device like the unit T-Mobile sells.

The iPod
I consider the Apple iPod a multitasker because the Mac OS version includes calendar and telephone-directory software that you can synchronize with your desktop or portable PC via iSync. These programs only let you view your appointments and contact info, which may sound funny to you. I know it did when I first heard about them. But the reality is that many of us just want to refer to calendar or contact items when we're on the road; we don't necessarily need to edit them. On the iPods, these features work out better than I expected. And, oh yeah, iPods play music, too.

Portable CD players
They may not seem like multitaskers in the sense I've used above. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that many portable CD players now play MP3s too.

Having now written an entire column essentially about the evils of standalone MP3 players, I should mention one instance where they do make sense: sports. Not for listening to games (though I often wonder why more of these devices don't include AM/FM radios), but for when you're actually participating.

Hard drive-based players (such as the iPod) seem a little delicate to me for use in vigorous activities. Likewise, anything with a large LCD screen (like my iPAQ) would make me nervous if I was out, say, bicycling. But simple players based on flash memory (like the ones Eliot and Bryan discuss in their video), provided they're easy to control while you're doing something else and sturdy enough to take rough use, seem ideally suited to sports use.

For dedicated MP3 players, I'll leave you to Brian and Eliot. But for general-purpose music playing, I'd urge you to consider a device that does more than just play tunes.