Mobile Mp3 Quandary

What to buy…

For my birthday, I’m looking to buy myself a digital music jukebox player/recorder. There are plenty of options, but none of which meet all of my requirements.

I’m going to play the wait-and-see game for a while. There are some new Minidisc players coming out that are candidates as well, although the tradeoff is smaller capacity to get a smaller form factor and jog-proof mechanism.

The most promising product is the Neuros, although some poor design decisions, including only providing USB 1.x support, may kill this one before it gets started. The promise for me is the ability to have both a memory-based player and a hard-drive based player in one. I could take it to the gym without the hard disk pack, but still be able to add the disk for roadtrips or just the daily commute. The built-in FM transmitter is another great feature.

PC Firewire iPod
Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen
Creative Nomad Jukebox 3
Neuros
Archos Jukebox Multimedia 20
Bantam Interactive BA1000