The market for tiny MP3 players is booming, and finding a way to distinguish one gadget from another is becoming virtually impossible.
But there is sometimes more to a player than the brand. The Danish/Korean JNC Digital may not be well known, but the company has been releasing some increasingly impressive gadgets of late.
The new iAudio range is similar in many respects to previous JNC players. Offerings in the new range are more boxy in design but benefit from a major boost in memory size. The top of the range SSF-810 comes with a massive gigabyte of storage.
That may seem small to the iPod's hordes of fans, but unlike the iPod, the JNC player is small enough to fit in a pocket. Perhaps looking at the iPod market, the iAudio's desktop software runs on either Windows or Mac OS. The software is not really necessary, however, as the device connects to any computer via USB, and appears as an external drive. Drag in your files and you are done. This means it can also be used for regular file storage.
Other features worth noting are that the iAudio supports MP3, Wav and Microsoft's WMA formats, and the record function can encode directly to MP3 from the built-in microphone, an external microphone, or even directly from the built-in FM radio.
The unit runs off a single AA-sized battery, rather than a recharger. So if you pump up the considerable volume to the max, you had better carry some spares with you.