Listen To This: Menus

As I discussed last time, the controls and menus are complimentary pieces of the interface to any media player.  So, having brought you the controls in the last installment, we’ll pick up right where we left off and discuss the menus on each of these players.

I found it interesting, once I starting comparing the various approaches to the menus, that they all fit within three general categories.  For all of their advanced features, the iPod Nano and Microsoft Zune both utilized a text based menu system.  It was most interesting that these two bitter rivals utilized such a similar interface.  The Creative Zen X-fi and Sandisk Sansa both offered a graphical menu system, in which only a portion of the menu was displayed at any time.  The Sony used a single screen menu system, with nine icons appearing on the screen for each of the nine basic features.  The Samsung was unique in that it fit all of these modes.  The menu on the Samsung was customizable, so that it could scroll vertically, horizontally, or appear all at once on a single screen.

Let’s jump in and take a closer look at each, and see how these menus interact with the various controls.

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Listen To This: Accessories

This is just a quick follow up to the hardware post in this series.  In that post, we looked at the hardware and some pseudo-unboxings.  Well, just to finish off the unboxing theme, I thought we could take a quick look at what else comes in the boxes.  And it is not much: a sync charge cable, some headphones, and various other sundry manuals.  Not much controversy there…or so you might think.

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