Mobile Entertainment at its Best
Will Heighington

Ever since the MP3 format surfaced on the Internet, there has been a need for a portable player capable of reading these files.  Over the last couple of years, continuously evolving technology has answered the public's need. Currently, there is an immense array of companies that produce MP3 players.  What makes an MP3 player great (or terrible) is its price, the number of songs it can hold, and the quality of its sound output.  

Since there are is a wide variety of MP3 players on the market, the price of an MP3 player is often a huge factor in a consumer’s choice of whether or not to buy it.  MP3 players range from $30 to over $500.  The average, run-of-the-mill MP3 player falls into the neighborhood of $150-$250, but there are many players which fall outside this range.  Made for consumers searching for players on the cheaper end of the scale, the D-Link DMP-90 Portable MP3 Player runs for a price of $30 (after rebate).  On the other extreme, the Nomad Jukebox Silver, which sells for $499, catches the eye of consumers who do not mind breaking the bank to buy a top-of-the-line MP3 player.  

The one major flaw of early MP3 players was that they could not hold many songs.  Such an MP3 player had 32mb of storage and could hold about 32 minutes of music encoded at 128bit/s.  As this amount of storage space equates to only half the storage space in a CD, it created a huge problem for many MP3 fans.  While companies still sell 32mb players and their descendants, the 64mb players, they have also produced some advanced alternatives.  The Nomad Jukebox from Creative, for example, solves the problem of storage space: it has the ability to hold up to 6Gigs of song files.  That translates to over 11,000 minutes of music. The best alternative, though, is the CD MP3 players.  They are portable CD players that read standard CD-formatted songs and MP3-encoded files.  With a CD burner, one can fit 650 megabytes onto one CD.  These players are also very cheap, despite their recent appearance on the market.  One of the best MP3 CD players is the MpTrip, which retails online for a measly price of $89. 

In short, the most appropriate MP3 player for a potential buyer depends most heavily upon the amount of money the buyer wants to spend.  If a cheap MP3 player is desirable, then look at the economical D-Link DMP-90 (www.dlink.com).  However, for buyers looking for the cream of the crop, then Creative’s Nomad Jukebox (www.creative.com), which has great quality and gargantuan amount of storage space, is probably more appropriate.  The one MP3 player that serves all of a buyer’s needs, providing  that the buyer has a CD-R, is the MPTrip.  It can hold infinite songs and it is very cheap at $89, while it provides great sound quality (www.easybuy2000.com).