jr conlin's ink stained banana

A few days ago, Anne Marie said something i swear i never thought i'd hear her say.

"So, would you help me find an MP3 player?"

After i checked her for alien influence and made sure there were no recently emptied pods lying around the bed, i did a bit of research to figure out what she might like.

i narrowed things down to the Sansa e200 (Bonus points, it's got a mini SD slot for extra memory), the Zen V (tiny+simple == win), the iRiver Clix, and yes, an iPod Nano (although that was missing a key feature she requested, a built in FM receiver).

We trundled off to Best Buy so that she could see the beasties herself, and surprisingly, they had all the models i was planning on showing her.

The runners up:
iPod Nano – "No. i don't like it and it doesn't have a radio."
Creative Zen – "Too Small." (Plus the battery was empty so we couldn't really play with it, even after letting it recharge for half an hour)
Sansa e200 – "Too Quiet". (This one surprised me too. Even on max volume, you could barely hear anything with it. Don't know if there was some weird setting that caused this, but we decided to skip anyway. Plus the screen wasn't that great.)

She went for the iRiver Clix for a bunch of reasons, including Simple Navigation (really, it is) big bright screen (no, really it is) has all the stuff she wants and then some (the pictures and video are nice add-ons), and it's "the right size" which i'm discovering is actually a good point. There is such a thing as too small. i got her the 2GB version, and even after loading up all her favorite music (Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Norah Jones, etc.) there's still well over a GB left.

There is something else interesting about this device. Since it can natively run Flash applications, it's possible to write mini-apps for it. i'll note that this isn't something you can do with iPods, since Apple (the current standard holder in "closed technology") hasn't released a programming kit for those. Gotta figure if there's a way to take advantage of that.

So, yeah, sorry all you iRiver fans. i wound up buying one of those. This, sadly, means that my product purchasing curse will undoubtedly extend to this company and they'll be out of business within a year. Still, it's a darn nice little player.