After numerous installments in this series, we are finally done with the preliminaries.  we have talked about the design of each of these players, the controls, and even the menus.  Now, it is time to get down to business with what I think is the single most important segment in this series: sound and audio.  Let’s get right to it.

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Short of actually playing media, which we will cover in the next couple of articles, the most important task your media player will need to perform is syncing.  This is the actual feat of loading music, videos, and other media from your computer onto your media player.  There are two general systems by which this may be accomplished.   The iPod Nano and Zune both offer a proprietary program, which is the only way to load or sync media.  The Samsung, Sony, Creative Zen, and Sandisk Sansa are all what I call agnostic players.  This means you can use any program or simply drag and drop to transfer data.  We’ll take a  closer look at each of these methods.

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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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So far, in this series, we have not really had much of a chance to get into specifics about the individual players.  We’ve done a quick overview, looked in the boxes, even checked out the hardware and accessories.  But none of what we have looked at so far has had much to do with the actual use of the players.  All of that is going to change now.  The next two articles will focus on the user interface.  Today, we will be talking about the controls on each of the six players.  In the next article, we’ll be looking at a related item, the menu systems in each player.  The two really go together, and if it helps, we can think of this as part 1 and the next one as part 2.

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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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