Articles tagged with: personal media players

Believe it or not, music lovers frustrated with not being able to download their favourite tracks from online music stores are turning to an innovative new technology in order to get music onto MP3 players.

Apparently, it's all the rage with Beatles fans unable download the Fab Four's warblings from iTunes. Instead, they’ve “found their own way of getting hold of Beatles MP3s” and "side-loading is the popular alternative to downloading... where you copy pre-played CDs onto your MP3 player."

It may seem like they’ve been around forever, but the MP3 player is only 10 years old – and its birthday is this month. Launched in at CeBIT in March 1998, the MPMan F10 was the first commercially available personal MP3 player and the $250 has a mere 32Mb of memory – enough for around eight tracks – though this could be upgraded to 64Mb by the manufacturer.

Despite some fairly stiff competition, Sony Ericsson remains king of the camera phone market with its CyberShot range. The CyberShot K800i’s 3-megapixel camera was the first to produce images good enough to print, and its xenon flash also made it the first phone to take acceptable night-time shots. The K850i is Sony Ericsson’s latest offering, and it promises even greater things with its integrated 5-megapixel camera.

Last month saw the arrival of Apple’s latest iPods. But while the iPod Touch is arguably in a league of its own, we weren’t quite so bowled over by the new iPod Nano — its squat figure divided opinion in the Mobile office and the larger fingered members of the team just weren’t sure what to make of the shrunken scroll wheel. It wasn’t all bad, but compared to the Touch, is distinctly underwhelming, and now Creative’s new Zen is here, it's got some serious competition.

Since many car head units lack a line-in socket, an FM transmitter is usually the simplest way to listen to an MP3 player while you’re driving. The problem is that finding a clear frequency in a built-up area can be a real challenge and even then, you’re likely to lose it if you drive any appreciable distance.

Apple clearly knows a thing or two when it comes to industrial design, but like the iPhone before it, the new iPod Touch is the most breathtakingly gorgeous electronic device we’ve ever seen. From the wraparound chrome back to the single sheet of glass that covers the front, it just oozes high-tech allure.

One of the most impressive aspects of the Touch’s design is how thin it is — a mere 8mm. This is the result of Apple switching from 1.8” hard disks to solid state flash memory, but this isn’t entirely without compromise. Flash memory is still comparatively expensive and to keep the Touch affordable, Apple is only offering it with 8Gb and 16Gb capacities.

The iPod Touch may be the very apotheosis of the personal media player concept, but the new Nano’s redesign is far less radical. It’s a whisker thinner than the old model, but wider with it and, it must be said, somewhat squat.

The peculiar shape is the result of squeezing in a 2” colour screen — just the thing for exploiting the Nano’s new video-playing ability. In reality, sitting through anything longer than a music video will send you cross-eyed — the screen is crisp, colours are vibrant and playback is smooth, but it’s just too small to stare at for long.

Gizmodo is reporting that one of its readers has figured out a way to run iPhone applications on the iPod Touch -- email, Google Maps, the lot (apart from the phone app, obviously).

There's a guide on how to do it available already, but it's lengthy and looks fiendishly complicated. It's based on the Jailbreak trick used to unlock the iPhone, and that recently backfired when Apple's latest update rendered unlocked phones all but useless.

The iPhone problem seemed to lie with its mobile phone functionality, though -- something that the Touch lacks. So, this is possibly a safer hack, though use it at your own risk...

[Gizmodo]

We’ve been really impressed by Archos’ 5-series range of PMPs and now its budget model, the 405, is vying for our attention. The 405 is a cut-down version of its larger sibling, the 605 WiFi, but by cutting out its fancier features, like Wi-Fi, Archos has been able to keep its price low. 

Although Sony’s previous MP3 Walkmans have generally been pretty capable music players, they’ve been hamstrung by the clunky SonicStage software — the only way to transfer songs onto the device. The NWZ-S515 is, however, Sony’s first player to let you drag-and-drop files as if it were a USB drive.