Harry's Blog

I'm in a fix. The reason? Wifey has just bought herself an iPod Touch. No I'm not suffering jealousy, my problem is that the device is clearly very good, it's almost the perfect mp3 player. But it's the "almost" that's annoying. The iPod Touch is a marvel of modern technology and arguably the best all-round small portable media player around - but it's still light years from being the device I want.

While I do have plenty of technology that's just right - my camera, TV, AV amp and the like, I've still not really nailed it with a portable music player. And the reason is I don't think the device I want exists.

Take the two mp3 players I already own...

The iRiver Clix 2 is an amazing piece of kit. I absolutely adore it. It's neat, very easy to use, attractive, the radio works well and it has an amazing screen. The sound quality is superb too and it features a wonderful killer app - the ability to read ebooks. It is almost the perfect piece of technology. Except...it's only got 4GB or memory. There is an 8GB model available, but that's really not enough, not for all the tunes I'd want to carry around.

So last year I got myself a Creative Zen 32GB. As the model name implies it clearly solves the issue I had with the Clix 2. Now the Zen is a great little player - the sound quality is very good, so is the screen and video playback, and it has tons of neat features. So why didn't my Clix 2 appear on Ebay then? Well there isn't an ebook reader on it. You can creat books for it via the sort of app that PSP users know and hate - by turning text into hundreds of little pictures - but that's hardly ideal.

Then there's my phone. Now we're getting somewhere here. The Nokia N96 has 16GB of space to store music, which isn't too bad, especially when you consider it has a memory expansion slot - though only for another 16GB. The sound quality is pretty good and I can read books on it too. But it's still not right. Syncing takes ages because the inbuilt memory is so bloody slow. The N96 has really fast GPS (much faster than the N95), good web browsing, Wifi and you can even use it as a phone. Yet it doesn't quite feel right. The N96 isn't dinky enough - it's always a phone, rather than a little device in the palm of your hand.

So what do I want? I suppose I want a 120GB iRiver Clix really - so I can listen to my lossless WMA files and read books at the same time. But this device doesn't exist. And looking around there doesn't seem to be a device like this available. Sure you can get larger mp3/media players with all the bells and whistles. But there doesn't seem to be a dinky little player that combines having plenty of memory with my other wish - the ability to read text files.

It's such a shame that there are no large capacity iRiver Clix 2 device, or that Creative won't release a software update for the Zen to let me read ebooks. Bother.

The search continues.

Update: It seems the device I want does exist. It's called the Cowon S9. It's a lot like the iPod touch except it will play the formats I'd want and has an inbuilt book reader. Now all I have to do is wait for the forthcoming 32GB version and start saving.

Update: Or maybe not. It seems the forthcoming P3 from Samsung and the X1000 from Sony look like the best flash-based mp3 players to be released this year. But they won't be out for a little while.