Introduction
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| The USB Lineup |
MP3 portable players are back at Neoseeker, and this time we take a look at 4 second or better generation portables to determine what makes good and what makes them bad. The criteria for this roundup? A USB interface, because the new wave is here, and it isnt going with the clunky and passé Parallel interface.
These newer players all sport features that make the first MP3 portables look prehistoric by comparison. LCD displays, built-in FM tuners, better support for memory media, and of course faster music transfers through a USB interface.
Although each of the players in the roundup shared a common USB interface, they each had their own personalities, and more interestingly their own media management software. The players that are covered here are all cream of the crop, since newer players tend to also be better players which improve on shortcomings of earlier models. Join us, as we check 4 players from Diamond, Creative, Sensory Science, and Yuan.
Why USB?
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| A four-some? |
MP3 portables arent new anymore, but these second and third generation players now include USB interfaces for transferring music files, and thats a big step forwards. USB is easily 5 times faster than the parallel interfaces that first generation MP3 portables used. Weve also noticed that with the move towards USB, most of the players have built in mechanisms for transferring files. While some of the older players included external drive units, the 4 players in this roundup all plug directly into the USB port and transfer files through that connection.
So how fast is USB? Our informal transfer tests found that the typical 64MB capacity player could be filled up in less than 5 minutes. The effective transfer rate worked out to be around 210-250Kb/sec, compared to 40-90KB/sec for similar tests on units using parallel interfaces. The same 64MB capacity would require no less than 2-5 times as long (10-25 minutes) to fill up when using a regular parallel interface. Add to that a much slower response when shuffling and deleting files through Parallel ports, and you can start to see the benefits of USB.
The USB interface can also be beneficial because it allows the players to do some pretty fancy things. The Yuan player, for example, charges its batteries while plugged into the USB port.
When you are limited to 64MB of storage, youre going to find yourself doing a lot of music management as you shuffle songs into and out of your portable players. With USB, it becomes a less painstaking effort.
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