iPOD: A Credit-Card-Sized Music Player. Media y Televisión :: Media & TV

iPOD: A Credit-Card-Sized Music Player


Fecha Viernes, septiembre 17 @ 05:35:44
Tema Media y Televisión :: Media & TV


Small is best. Credit-card size as an standard in the industry.

NEW YORK - When it comes to digital music players, there's more to life than just the iPod.

Sure, Apple Computer's (nasdaq: AAPL) sensationally successful digital music player, which is about the size of a deck of playing cards, is everywhere these days--I saw no less than a dozen people sporting the telltale white headphones on a recent subway ride. Yet there are plenty of other players on the market that are also excellent.


Creative Labs' MuVo Slim

The iPod has been successful because it packs a small but capacious hard drive into a tight, attractive package. But the first MP3 players used flash memory chips rather than hard drives, and many still do. For the past few days, I've been playing with the MuVo Slim from Creative Labs (nasdaq: CREAF), and have been pleasantly surprised by its simplicity--and its size--plus some interesting features.
First the size. If you stack five or six credit cards on top of each other, you'll have a very good idea of this player's dimensions. If you're like me and have a messy desk, the device is small enough that you'll occasionally lose it among the clutter, as I did twice in one day.

But, for its size, it sounds great. I loaded a few Louis Armstrong and Led Zeppelin tunes on it in MP3 format and found sound quality (using a pair of Shure EC3 headphones) was excellent for the subway ride home.

The MuVo Slim even offers a few things that the iPod doesn't. One is an FM radio, which was OK but not great. It tended to be staticky as I moved around, but so are most radios.

One nice feature that's likely to start showing up on competing models is the ability to record music from the radio. Hear a song you like and don't want to forget it? You can record it directly to the device. I think the record feature is a few too many clicks away on the control wheel, though, especially when you're in a hurry to record something. Aside from recording radio, it has an internal microphone to record sound, like the tape recorders we all played with as kids. In both cases, it saves the sound as WAV files, which can be saved to a PC later.

While Creative doesn't officially support Apple's Macintosh computers, on a lark I happened to connect this player to my Mac at home, running OS X version 10.3 (aka Panther), and noticed that it showed up on my desktop as though it were a flash memory keychain drive. Not only that, but it also appeared in my iTunes playlist. I converted a few songs from the AAC format that Apple prefers into regular MP3 files. (These were songs not purchased from the iTunes store, but ripped from my personal CD collection.) Then I simply dragged the MP3 files into the MuVo Slim's directory, and they played flawlessly. But keep in mind that the device doesn't officially support the Mac.

The player has 256 megabytes worth of memory, which is enough to hold about eight hours worth of music in Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Windows Media format. The battery lasts for about 17 hours on a single charge. I had no difficulty with it running out.

The MuVo Slim currently sells for around $170, but I'm told the price should drop within the next two weeks or so. I'm also told a 512-MB version is on the way.

If you've avoided the iPod for some reason, Creative Labs makes as wide a range of digital music players as one could hope for from any company. If the MuVo Slim is indicative of the rest of its product lineup, then there's a lot to like. I have no problem recommending this player to anyone for whom an iPod may be overkill.

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