I can't wait to get my hands on this frickin' thing...
A portable mp3 player, but not one of those craptastic flash memory jobbers that holds one album at most - this one has a 6 GB drive! OK, yeah, it's not using flash memory, so it can skip, but it's got five minutes of skip protection! It also supports WMA and WAV formats, and has reprogrammable firmware for additional future format support. It's got a USB interface to transfer music (much faster than serial) and four channel surround sound support. Plus, they're going to have a car adapter for it, and it weighs less than a pound (which is some bizarre, English measurement of weight). This is awesome.
OK, yeah, it retails for $600, and the batteries only last for six hours. I don't care! I was going to get a old laptop to do this anyway, but now they've given it to me in a small, convenient package. This is too cool for words. I'm really quite excited.
Update! Thanks to
Girlface for reminding me that I actually noded this thing. Rather than post a review (since one already resides here), I will comment on the one problem I've had with it, and refute one of the statements made below...
- My issue: The software kind-of sucks. On a PC, you get "PlayCenter2", and I get the feeling that it's really designed for a lower volume player. It can scan your machine and add all your mp3s into a music library. But I've got around 6,000 mp3s, and it took well over a half-hour for PlayCenter2 to add them all, with no progress bar, no hourglass, nothing. I basically left the room and came back some time later, and then waited for it to finish.
- My refutement (is that a word?): There is a shuffle mode, although it's not very intuitive to get to. To shuffle, select the Details button where you're in the Queue. From the Details screen, hit Mode until the desired mode is selected.
Oh yeah... some additional info... I got it for $429 from Amazon, and The Custodian is right... you only get about 4 hours of battery life. There's no WMA file support yet (although there is on the Nomad and Nomad II), and the ID3 tags work fine when uploaded from the PlayCenter.
And while I'm rambling in incoherent paragraphs, I have a question for anyone out there that has one of these things... When you look at the details for a song in the Albums view, it always says "Track Number Unknown On". Where can I fill this in? Do you know how irritating it is to listen to Enigma albums out of order?