Portable Music Players

An Introduction to Portable Music Players

Today’s portable music players (PMPs), also known as “MP3 players” or “digital audio players” (DAPs), all owe something to the iPod. The first iPod was released by Apple in 2001, and by 2004 they dominated the market. They weren’t the first PMPs, but they did do it better than anyone else, and it took a while for other companies to catch up.

Now it’s 2010 though, and a host of other companies have learnt from their past mistakes, making today’s PMP market very, very competitive, with great options at every price point.

Let’s take a look at what you get for your money in each the three PMP price-categories; budget; mid-range, and high-end.

Budget PMPs – cheap and cheerful

There are really two sub-divisions in the budget PMP world. First, you have the small-and-simple kind such as the new 4GB iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation and the 8GB SanDisk Sansa Clip+. There’s a lot to like about these: they’re inexpensive ($75 for the Shuffle, $60 for the Clip+); they’re miniscule and therefore perfect for a trip to the gym; they don’t necessarily compromise on sound quality, and the amount of storage they offer (2, 4 or 8GB) is perfectly adequate for music files. You’re not going to be doing anything with them but listening to music, but for those prices, who cares?

The other sub-division of budget PMPs is the cheap-imitation kind. Both the Pro Ebiz ($50) and the Coby MP836 ($105) mimic the iPod Touch, and in some ways they do a pretty good job of it. Look closely and you start to see why they’re as cheap as they are, but for less picky customers they represent truly awesome value.

Mid-range PMPs – a beautiful compromise?

For the mid-range and high-end, “PMP” really stands for “portable media player” rather than “portable music player,” as these devices usually offer video playback as well as just audio. This category is where we find Apple’s iPod Nano, the Sony NWZ-S738F Walkman and the 3rd generation Microsoft Zune.

Mid-range portable music players such as these Apple, Sony and Microsoft models are characterized by good looks, a nice color screen, and features such as pedometers, FM radio, and even (in the case of the Nano) video cameras. The downfall of these mid-range PMPs is that you’re paying a premium ($150+) for a device that, because of their limited screen sizes, you’re probably just going to use as a music player most of the time. On the other hand, that doesn’t stop them from selling well: the Nano is the best-selling iPod that Apple makes.

The mid-range bracket also contains some interesting off-brand options. The Creative Zen X-Fi looks a little odd but sports a 2.5 inch screen, has a massive feature list, produces great audio and video, and is very competitively priced. The Cowon D2+ has a 2.5 inch touchscreen, amazing sound quality, and its 8 or 16GB of internal memory is expandable. The Slacker G2 is something different again, not an “MP3 player” at all but rather a device for listening to unlimited free music through the use of personalized virtual radio stations.

High-end PMPs – bells, whistles and more

Touchscreen interfaces have allowed high-end PMPs to take a big step forward as the freedom from having to have tactile controls means that almost the entire footprint of the device can be devoted to the screen. Go from an iPod Nano to an iPod Touch and you’re going from a 2.2 inch screen to a 3.5 inch one, and that increase means that you could actually watch a full-length movie on it without extreme discomfort.

What can you do on a high-end PMP? Pretty much whatever you damn well please! The capabilities of devices such as the 3rd generation iPod Touch, the Zune HD, the Samsung P3 and the Sony X Series Walkman are truly amazing. Why settle for just listening to music when you can send email, play games, surf the internet, download movies and listen to audio books, podcasts and digital radio? The Archos 5 Internet Media Tablet offers all that and more, including storage up to a staggering 500GB.

The only downsides to high-end PMPs are their size and cost. But if you have deep pockets (both literally and figuratively!), they’re fantastic.