Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Toby]

Anyone got any useful info on this please?

What's the best one to buy?

[Bulsajo]

There's already a ton of 'useful' info on the subject in this forum- no one can tell YOU what is the best one to buy because we all have different expectations about what we want them to do and how much we want to pay for them. I'm afraid you're going to have to do some thinking for yourself on this one.

I'm an advocate of 'no moving parts' players (flash memory as opposed to a mini-HD; And then of course there are also the MP3-CD and MD player advocates...). I don't want a player with a mini HD- the more moving parts, the more chance of mechanical failure. This limits the size, but I find 512MB to be sufficient for my needs. Perhaps this is constantly improving, but I believe that HD players still use more juice than flash memory players, and this either adds to their weight and/or limits their play time between battery changes/recharges.

I'm also not big on the rechargeable MP3 players- if I can't buy a cheap and ubiquitous battery for it anywhere (e.g. AAA) but instead have to lug around a recharger if I'm away from home for any length of time, well then- no thank you. If I want recharging I'll buy my own set of rechargeable batteries and carry a spare.

Having said that, I'm extremely pleased with my Korean-made MPIO FL-100 flash memory MP3 player:

http://www.mpio.com/goods/fl100.php

http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review1066.html

http://gear.ign.com/articles/383/383286p1.html?fromint=1

http://www.i4u.com/article1084.html

It's a flash player, it plays a wide variety of formats, has upgradeable firmware, has expandable memory, is USB 2.0 compatible for fast loading, is extremely light and small, uses 1 AAA battery and has decent run-time between battery changes, has FM radio, has voice recording capability, it never skips no matter how many bumps you hit or how hard you shake it, it can be used as a portable data storage device (although its not great in that capacity as you need a USB cable and need to have the software installed on whatever computers you are uploading/downloading to/from; but still it's great for me to bring files/video back and forth from work to home) it's half the price of a mid-range iPod. For me it was an obvious choice, but it did take a lot of on-line and in-store comparison-shopping before I made my decision.