Listen To This! The Great JAMM Portable Media Player Showdown. Part 2: Hardware

When I started thinking about this series, one of the hardest things to wrap my brain around was where to begin.  Then, I thought about Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.  “Start at the very beginning.  A very good place to start.”  You know what?  That is excellent advice.  So, rather than getting into some of the more complex areas like playing music or videos, I thought we would start with what you see right out of the box.  Usually, the battery is dead or near to it when you buy a new media player, so the first thing you are going to do is not watch a video or play some music.  The first thing you will do is tear through that box and examine the hardware (pining for the ability to use it while it is charging.)  So, I thought it made the most sense to start there…right out of the box.  And we will do that in a few initial articles.

Today, I am going to take a look at the players themselves.  Turned off, and just looking at the hardware and construction.  The next two installments will look at the rest of the contents of the respective boxes, including earphones and accessories.  We’ll then wrap up this initial section with a look at the controls on each of the devices.  Then, we’ll start to look into what happens when you turn these things on and start playing with them.  So, let’s jump right in and start at the very beginning.  You slowly and carefully remove your new device from the packaging…

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Listen To This! The Great JAMM Portable Media Player Showdown. Part 1: Introduction

I have spent a considerable amount of time here at JAMM, and also at Gear Diary, reviewing portable media players.  One thing I have noticed is that a stand-alone review is really not the best format to help users answer the real question on everyone’s mind: which one should I buy?  While a review is nice, it looks at a particular media player in a vacuum.  The missing piece in the review is how this one compares to the others.  And that is what I want to try to accomplish through this series. 

So, in addition to the Sandisk Sansa View, which I already own, I went on eBay and gobbled up a  Microsoft Zune, Samsung YP-P2, and Creative Zen X-Fi.  Heck, I even got the Sony Walkman A828 back on an extended loan.  After considerable thought, I also replaced my iPod Touch with the new fourth generation iPod Nano for this series. 

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Sony goes iPod and iPhone wild with 4 new devices!

So today Sony goes nuts and launched four new devices - all iPod and iPhone compatible including a HD Radio w/ tagging, CD Clock Radio, Docking Speaker and finally a Boombox! Yes Boombox. Did anyone else immediately think of this?!

Yea … anyway thankfully the Sony model looks a lot better than that. For those of young ones of you who just asked yourself WTF is that - it’s called a GhettoBlaster - look it up.

Full text of the press release after the jump…

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i Rumours…

Kevin Rose posted a picture of what might be the new iPod Nano, then Brandon shared a link with me, that indicated there was a company out there making cases to fit an iPod that resembles this form factor. Anyone recall the furor around the “fattie” the iPod ugly duckling? It turned out to be a swan didn’t it? 

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Google Talk for iPhone…

It had to happen, and in timely manner for the release of the Second coming of the “Jesus Phone”. Over at the Google Mobile blog we have a new release of Google talk designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod touch. It doesn’t involve any downloads or software installs, it all works through the installed browser. I wonder if this was the way the iPhone was actually intended to work, over the air.

The beauty of this app from Google is that it’s dependent on the browser, so it’ll work with the now “He’s not the Messiah, he’s just a naughty boy” first generation iPhone as well.

There are some differences from using Google Talk on your computer. For instance, in order to receive instant messages with Google Talk on your iPhone, the application needs to be open in your Safari browser. When you navigate away to another browser window or application, your status will be changed to “unavailable” and your Google Talk session will be restarted when you return.

I appreciate the fact that they’ve tried as much as possible, to keep this as true to the desktop application as they can,Have a look at the Official Google Mobile Blog for more on this.

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