Which MP3 player is best for you? Read these mini-reviews some of the most popular models currently available. You don’t need to break the bank to put hundreds or even thousands of songs and hundreds of videos in the palm of your hand.
Not sure which type of player is right for you? Read How to choose a portable MP3 player.
Apple iPod Touch: While the iPhone has incorporated a lot of the iPod Touch's features, there's still plenty of people who could do with the music playing and without the data fees from AT&T and Verizon. The iPod Touch sports a 3.5-inch display and runs Apple's iOS 4 (it can also be upgraded to the new iOS 5, due in this fall). It's like an iPhone in many respects, with a high-resolution Retina display with multi-touch capabilities (i.e. you can swipe, pinch and otherwise whirl your fingers around the screen to navigate the menu). There's Wi-Fi connectivity for downloading music, movies and videos from iTunes as well as the full universe of software apps that has catapulted the iPhone to fame.
The 7.2mm thick Touch has a sleek design, with stainless steel on the back and shimmering glass on the front. Music is stored on 32GB of flash memory, but there's no memory card slot for adding additional capacity. If you shake it, an accelerometer will automatically shuffle your playlist (the so-called "shake-to-shuffle" feature).
It has a pair of cameras, but the Touch isn't close to the camera competitor that the iPhone is. Its front-facing camera can record 720p HD video (nice) and .7-megapixel still images (not nice). The front camera is designed for video-chatting and captured VGA-resolution video at 30 frames per second.
Archos Vision 24c: This media player packs 8GB worth of flash memory in a low-cost package ($55). You use a 2.4-inch color display to navigate your tracks and the unit supports playback of MP3 and WAV files. It has an FM radio along with a recording feature that lets you record live radio to a flash card (the same feature can double as a voice-recorder). There's even a camera for recording video and photos, though it's very low resolution (0.3 megapixels).
Cowon J3: It doesn't have the name recognition of some of the bigger players in the MP3 market, but the Cowon J3 does have a few features the iPod Touch does not. To wit: a flash memory card slot to expand the 8GB of internal storage with microSD cards and an FM radio. The 3.3-inch touchscreen display uses the bright AMOLED technology found on several higher-end smartphone screens.
It features built-in Bluetooth, for connecting wireless headphones, as well as a built-in speaker for listening to your tunes without headphones at all. It offers an FM radio, voice recorder and a TV out so you can view stored content on a TV.
SanDisk Sansa Fuze+: The Fuze+ is pretty much an all-around portable media player. In addition to digital music, it tackles photos, video, FM radio and even does a little voice recording on the side. All this in a svelte package: 3.1 x 1.9 x .3-inches and just 2.1 ounces. It's literally so light you'll forget it's in your pocket (just don't that before laundry time...).
You interact with the Fuze + through a nice 2.4-inch color display with a resolution of 320 x 240. Below the display is a touch-strip navigation pad for scrolling through your music library and navigating around the Sansa's menu items. So you're not quite dealing with a touch screen display, but you don't have any clunky tactile buttons cluttering up the Sansa's sleek face.
One of the nice things about the Sansa Fuze+ is that it supports essentially every music file format you can think of - MP3, WMA, Wav, protected WMA files from pay services like Rhapsody and Napster and AAC files for all those iTunes lovers (the Fuse is also Mac-compatible just to tempt Apple lovers a bit more).
The Fuze + can also play back video files such as standard definition H.264, WMV and MPEG-4 format video. Included software lets you convert other video files (including HD videos from the Flip and other pocket camcorders) into a Sansa-friendly format for viewing on the go. Photos, too, are allowed in on the fun with JPEG and BMP support out of the box and the converter software on hand to handle TIFF, GIF and PNG photo files. The Fuze+ comes in black, white, purple or blue.
