Dead Players
Written on 2008-01-22 17:12:10
The long weekend was really nice. It was good to get the time off and I’m excited about this week. I even talked to Teresa a little about potentially going back to school and maybe becoming a professor down the road. We’ll see. Unfortunately, my beloved MP3 player decided it was going to die on me. And the thing is, without being able to listen to my music everywhere I fall apart a little. The gym’s harder and less fun. Work isn’t quite as good. Ditto for driving places. Haven’t you noticed FM radio is mostly awful? Anyway, now I have to figure out what to do about that missing piece of technology. I don’t know when I’ll do it but I’ll probably try to replace it sooner rather than later due to my predilection with mobile music. Plus payday is on Thursday.The player I had before broke because it’s a hard drive player. It has moving parts. And you have to recognize that’s sort of an undesirable design limitation on something you take to the gym or are really mobile with. Hard Drive based players are just much more likely to fail. Flash players (which don’t have moving parts) have existed for years but they’ve only recently gotten into a storage capacity range that makes them eligible for my dollars.
That said, this throws a kink into my technology roadmap a little. Before my player’s death I was pretty well set up for this year. Sure, at some point down the line I wouldn’t mind a mobile game system (the PSP) or a new phone that I can check e-mails on (the OpenMoko) but I really don’t consider those essentials. Now, I need a new MP3 player and playing MP3s is something the PSP and OpenMoko are well-equipped to do. Nothing like consolidation of devices, right? Thing of it is, whatever I’m going to use needs to interoperate with Linux well and have a 16gb capacity or more. The MP3s stored on my current player took up about 13gb but it helps to have growing room.
The nice thing about getting the PSP would’ve been that it’s competitively priced with an MP3 player and would play games AND stream music from my PS3…but I’d have to be near a wifi access point. I could store the music on a memory stick and then I wouldn’t need to stream it wirelessly from home but 16gb memory sticks for the PSP aren’t coming out til March and even then they’ll be more expensive than the PSP itself. So, that’s out. SDHC memory (which the OpenMoko uses) also haven’t reached sizes above 12gb and the phone is prohibitively more expensive then a replacement player or the PSP.So, at this point it looks like getting another Creative Zen Vision M 30gb (which I did like before it’s untimely demise) or a SanDisk Sansa View 16gb. The Sansa is a $50 bump over the Zen’s ~$125 but there might be one cheaper on craigslist and I’m thinking I’ll go with that due to mostly positive reviews and it’s durability and size-benefits from being flash-based. Anyway, it was fun to at least consider the OpenMoko and PSP Slim. I did a sizeasy comparison of the devices and my current phone (the Nokia 2610) to see how they all matched up for room in my pocket. Wanna see?
Unless otherwise credited all material 
by Brit Butler 