The latest MP3 players come with built-in hard disks. That means they can hold a lot more tunes
[MP3 players]
Walk down the street and count the number of people plugged into key-chain-sized MP3 players. Once in a while you may even spot the tell-tale white ear buds of an iPod. This is the second stage of the Iinternet music revolution and it's all about portability.
Flash memory players, with their small storage capacity, are fine if you want to carry just a few tunes along with you. But what if you're looking to carry your whole music collection out of the door? The answer is a portable jukebox: an MP3 player that packs a hard disk drive for serious storage. It's a concept popularised by Apple's iPod.
But the iPod isn't the be-all and end-all when it comes to portable jukeboxes. Others blazed the trail long before Apple got its designers to work on the case. Take Creative, a company with a pedigree in digital multimedia stretching back more than 10 years. They launched their first portable MP3 player in 1999. In this review, we bring you an exclusive peek at their new Jukebox Zen NX, which will be launched locally in time for Christmas.
And then there's iRiver. 'iWho?' you may ask. Well, you'll be forgiven for not having heard of the name, but don't brush it off lightly. iRiver may not be a household name, but it has been building up quite a reputation for itself in MP3 portables over the last few years, first with CD-based systems, next with flash-memory players and now with jukeboxes.We've got a pre-release model of their new iHP-120, which should be hitting shops soon.
Of course, no review of high-capacity MP3 players would be complete without the iPod itself. And we've added a splash of key-chain players from Samsung and Creative for good measure.