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Saturday, January 30, 2010

A Closer Look At MP3 Players

By David Morris

It's easy to enjoy music with a digital MP3 player, or MP4 player as they are sometimes called. With a shuffle function you can listen to your songs in a random order, and fit your whole music library on a pocket sized player. Have you ever wondered where your music is stored?

It was common in the past, for MP3 players to use an internal mini hard drive to for data storage. Having a mini hard drive means the MP3 player has lots room to hold music files. The Apple iPod Classic MP3 player has up to 160GB storage and Archos also has players with similar capacity. One of the drawbacks though, of using mini hard drives in MP3 players, is that they make the players more bulky and heavier. They also demand more power to run, so potentially decrease the battery run time.

More recently MP3 player manufactures have started using flash memory to replace mini hard drives. There are now very few MP3 players that use hard drives. Instead they have an inbuilt flash memory chip and often have a slot to hold a second flash memory card, thereby increasing the player's memory.

Both manufactures and consumers have found benefits with flash memory based MP3 players. As a flash memory chip is very small compared to a hard drive, it means that manufactures can create very small MP3 players. Flash memory also uses considerably less energy, and so there are big improvements in battery life.

While flash memory is popular, there are some drawbacks. Flash memory has much more limited storage, usually between 8GB to 16GB, when compared to hard drive, especially when compared to the 160GB models from Apple and Archos. It can also be expensive to purchase additional memory cards to add to the player.

Did you know that you use your MP3 player for more than just music. MP3 player now come with color screens. This means you can watch videos and movies, as well as look at pictures. Screen sizes vary, typical small sizes are 1.8 inch while the larger sizes can be 4.3 inch and 5 inch. Interestingly enough, Apple's Ipod Touch has a relatively modest 3.5" display. The bigger the screen the more you will enjoy watching movies, and the larger screens are often in 16:9 ratio too. - 18423

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