- Beyond the Hype
- Hard Drive Players
- Micro Drive Players
- Flash Memory Players
- Playing Your Music
- Conclusion
- Tip Sheet
Flash Memory Players
A Flash memory player is the hottest market segment because of the low cost of entry. Flash memory is cheap—all a company needs to do is slap a USB connector to the memory, a slim battery, and a navigation device to get the music. Flash memory is also more resilient than hard drive systems. If you exercise outdoors, go skiing, or are pushing your MP3 player to weather extremes, you should use Flash memory.
The big downside to Flash memory is the size of the memory. You don't have as much to play with as you do with the hard drive systems. For this reason, you will want to keep your Flash memory MP3 players for times when you need only a handful of tunes.
Some of the best deals of Flash memory players I have found are these:
- Samsung YEPP YP-T7Z (1GB)—$199
- Cowon America iAudio U2 (1GB)—$189
- iRiver iFP-790 (256MB)—$84