Tag archive: MP3 Players

Good, rational decisions are rarely born out of fear. Yesterday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) met to discuss a massive collision involving “two school buses, a bobtail, and a passenger vehicle” back on Aug. 5, 2010 in Missouri. This collision was caused by a truck driver who was texting while driving. While there is no doubt that texting or reading anything on your phone is a bad idea and a ban on it is probably a… Read More

All the hype from Apple's live press event today definitely surrounded the prospect of an iPhone 5 (which turned out to only be an iPhone 4S), but Tim Cook and his colleagues discussed several other new developments in the Apple world before moving on to the important stuff. While it may have gotten lost in the iPhone 4S shuffle, there was important news about the lives of the iPod Nano and the iPod Touch. Both are new, improved, and… Read More

The Zune brand is now dead as a hardware line, says Microsoft. The software giant has confirmed that the Zune HD is no longer being manufactured. This is not a new revelation, as Microsoft hasn't introduced new Zune hardware or featured it in some time. Instead, it has migrated the Zune software to Windows Phone, where it lives happily and remains one of the best music players on the market. “We recently announced that, going… Read More

Buying a gift for the mother in your life, whether it be your own or your children’s, can be a tricky enterprise. You have to avoid certain stereotypically “mother” inspired gifts, and the same holds true for tech-inspired presents. Yes, there are some very cool high-tech baby monitors and vacuum cleaners on the market, but no mother wants one of those on her special day. In other words, her tech-inspired gift should be about her. So without… Read More

Designed for the music aficionado who likes to make a statement, and in homage to the lost importance of album art, Playbutton is an electronic music player that functions as a single album to wear and listen to. The button contains music that is pre-recorded and can’t be changed or downloaded. The back of the button has a pinback for wearability, play, pause, skip, and volume controls. 

Chances are if you have purchased a video for your iPod or PSP that it’s encoded in the Mp4 codec. If you would like to extract the audio for your music player, then converting the Mp4 file to an Mp3 is a must. Luckily the process is simple, and there’s an abundance of free converters on the web that will do almost all the work for you.

SanDisk’s versatile Clip+ may have outranked Apple’s latest Shuffle in just about every practical sense, but it takes a special kind of player to oust the Cupertino giant in the style department. That said, we may have spotted a device that could do the job: iRiver’s new N20.

For years, consumer and health advocates have warned about the dangers of pumping loud music into our heads using personal music players like iPods and cell phones: health and safety experts have long warned that most music players can put out music volumes that, over time, can lead to long term hearing loss—especially for folks who insist on tapping into their tunes for hours at a time. Now the European Union is doing something about it,… Read More

Face it – with well over 120 million units sold, no company even comes close to touching the extraordinary success that Apple has enjoyed with its iPod-branded portable media players. Between classic, nano, shuffle and touch models (not to mention nearly 35 million iPhones sold to date), the almighty iPod has become all but synonymous with MP3 players in just a few short years (and perhaps the first “Kleenex” or “Frisbee”… Read More

As you may have noticed if you’ve leafed through a SkyMall catalog or walked into a Brookstone store lately, there are a lot of stupid gadgets out there. If someone can make a buck off it, it will be built. (And as the recent bankruptcy of Sharper Image proves, sometimes even that isn’t a prerequisite.) But before you write off the premise of better life through gadgets entirely based on your experiences with an ionic air purifier and a… Read More

Full disclosure: Any roundup of MP3 or portable media players that claims to be a definitive “best of” collection isn't a roundup you should be reading. The truth is that there's simply far too much product variety in this category for any one critic – or legion of critics – to authoritatively rate them all, especially given the subjective way in which different features connect with different types of user. So instead,… Read More

A couple of days ago, Philadelphia City Paper inadvertently ignited the first big (tongue in cheek) Obama presidential controversy when it reported that Obama, who had evidently said he used an iPod, was seen using a Zune when he exercised. The formal position, evidently, had been that Obama was an iPod man, and that Apple was a big contributor to his campaign. Later, a supposed Obama spokesman reported to the Wall Street Journal that the… Read More

Last week the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Dell was again looking at the MP3 business and that I was involved in the effort. I’ve been fascinated with the success of the iPod for some time now and the fact that even though it is very clear how Apple took the market, there has yet to emerge a truly serious competitor to Apple’s leadership. This is primarily because no one wanted to match Apple on all aspects of their program… Read More

If you’ve been considering buying one of the 80GB Zune media players for Christmas, you might as well start sweating now. They’re sold out all across the Web, and the chances of finding one at a bricks-and-mortar retailer stand somewhere between slim and none.   Microsoft has promised more stocks will be available in around two weeks, and an Amazon spokesperson has told the Associated Press that they’re receiving a few units each week and… Read More

MR-500i Redefines What A Music Player Can Be The flagship model of the new Olympus m:robe series is the MR-500i that combines a 20-gigabyte digital music player with a 1.22-megapixel digital camera to create a compact and stylish multimedia device unlike any other that's come before it. With a one-of-a-kind “No Button” flat touch-screen interface incorporated into a vibrant 3.7-inch color VGA LCD display, music and digital… Read More