MP3 Players Reviews

First Steps: Brainstorming - Or: How To Find Your Perfect Product?

Your first thought should not be what kind of design or brand it could be but how – and for what exactly – you are going to use your new MP3- or Media player. Do you want it to be your companion during your work-out? Do you want to store your complete music collection on it? Are you also planning to watch videos on it (which is great for long distance travelling)? Would you like to make it your portable photo collection? Wanna listen to audio books? Do you wish any other functions like voice recording, radio reception, wireless capability (wireless music purchasing and downloads, song sharing), voice recording or personal information management (phone books and schedules).

This automatically leads to the questions whether you need big storage capacity or whether it is more important to have easy-to-use controls.

Basic distinction of the three types:

Memory Flash Players
These players offer those with integrated memory, separate memory cards and USB drive MP3 players and are the most affordable and the smallest in size. With few moving parts they are ideal for every day listening and during exercise.

Hard Drive Players
If you want your portable music library, this is the type of player you need. Hard drive players store between 1,000 to over 15,000 tracks depending on their capacity. Storage size can vary from 2GB to over 40GB. Hard drive players usually offer small screens displaying track and artist details plus a user-friendly menu system to choose songs.

Multimedia Players
These players use large hard drives and are bigger and heavier than other MP3-Players. This size and storage capacity is to enable the displaying of photographs and video playback. With these devices you can enjoy watching your favorite movies or music videos. One single portable device offers access to your favourite music, videos and photos.

Display
Next to size and design, an important factor to consider is the display. It is useful to have it big enough to show the entire song title and have it readable under all conditions including outdoors. In case you want to watch videos and photos on your MP3-Player big display is a crucial factor.

Weight
The weight of MP3 players starts at about 40g per player for small integrated memory players, but is usually more in the range of 300g for a large multimedia player. The greater the storage capacity of the player the larger the size and the heavier the weight. Following the current development of storage technology size and weight is constantly reduced.

Capacity
The memory capacity of your MP3 Player is essential for the amount of music storage. The basics you need to know to understand what is behind the abbreviations is "MB" as the abbreviation for megabyte which it basically speaking a unit for measuring data. "GB" means gigabyte, which is a larger measurement of data stored. 1 gigabyte is equivalent to 1024 megabytes.

Average speaking you can assume that one song on a MP-Player needs approximately 4 MB memory size (a rule of thumb is that 1 minute of music = 1 MB), meaning that a 512 MB Player offers space for approximately 130 songs.

Introduction to MP3 Players

The market for MP3 and Media Players has grown rapidly during the last few years, making it more and more difficult for buyers to find the best product. You can basically distinguish between three main kinds of players - flash memory players, hard-drive p... Read more