40 gigabytes of groove on my hip and feeling very geeky
We celebrated Christmas a week early this year, as much of our family will be travelling interstate. So Sunday became the day of pressies, kids, rellies, photos, food, wine and of course the cricket (a day the Pakistans would like to forget, all out for 79 runs - what a shocker!). And yeah, I finally caved in to the marketing pressure and purchased a MP3 player - my Christmas present for 2004.
Yes, I took the plunge and bought an MP3 player. But not just any ordinary 128mb MP3 Player, following the motto of “if somethings worth doing, do it right first time”, I purchased the iRiver H340 with a capacity of 40 gigabytes, colour LCD, ability to host other USB devices (eg. copy photos from your digital camera without requiring a PC), act as a mobile hard disk and most importantly support for the Ogg Vorbis codec.
And what a truly geeky little device it is. Fits easily into the palm of my hand, weighs next to nothing and has more storage capacity than I have allocated for the Windows partition on my laptop! What also surprised me was the speed of USB2.0 vs USB1.1. Transferring 30mb using USB1.1 took 10 minutes or so, using USB2.0 this time is reduced to 1 minute. Frighteningly fast. Quiet as a mouse during operation, you can only feel a slight vibration as the internal hard disk seeks/reads during playback and I suspect it only does this to load a large portion of the file into its internal memory.
The entire package came with a heap of accessories: USB cables, head phones, cradle, external lapel microphone, charger, external battery pack and hip case. Pretty good value I thought. Unlike the iPods where these are “optional extras” ($ cha-ching $).
I also purchased this little companion gadget from Belkin - TuneCast II Mobile FM Transmitter. So now I can broadcast my own personal radio station (FM 90, Radio Freeman) into my car stereo, home stereo or into any nearby radio. You definitely can notice the difference between the commercial FM stations and the Tunecast. Sound is reasonable, but not as sharp or loud as from the player, I suspect that the little FM transmitter is somewhat under-powered and losing quality as a result. However, it’s a concession I’m happy to take just to listen to my own music.
I’m pretty happy with this purchase and once the pain of parting with $700 has subsided I expect the happiness will increase ten-fold. It will be very interesting to follow this market as it continues to evolve. Is it unreasonable to expect mobile Terabyte devices in 2 to 3 years time? Should be ready to upgrade by then
For more information on the iRiver and purchasing in Australia, check out these on-line shops:











