New MP3 Player
Pretend you’re a teenager with money to burn. Are you going to buy an iPod shuffle:
Sleek, stylish, and the toy all your friends are buying. Or will you buy:
…a Sony Walkman Bean?
Seriously, it’s called the Bean.
It’s actually a pretty nifty device; it has an OLED display, a 50 hour battery life (!), and some kind of rapid charge technology that’ll give you 3 hours worth of music on a three-minute charge. It’ll play MP3s as well as Sony’s proprietary audio file format. And it comes in colors other than white.
On the other hand, it costs thirty dollars more than the shuffle. And then there’s the name, which I can’t say without chuckling.
My biggest disappointment: There’s no green Bean.
August 19th, 2005 at 7:26 pm
I bought an iPod shuffle in May and it died in July. It froze up at the gym and I couldn’t re-set it. I let the battery run down, re-charged and re-initialized the software but it still won’t work.
I’ve had better luck with the iPod. No problems in the two years I’ve used them.
August 19th, 2005 at 8:54 pm
Really? I thought that Flash-based stuff was supposed to be nigh-indestructable. Guess not….
August 19th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
Yeah - I was surprised. I never liked the shuffle - no readout, very slow to download.
Which of the two did you buy?
August 19th, 2005 at 11:15 pm
Oh, I’m not in the market for an MP3 player at the moment. I’ve got my Zen Touch for my big MP3 player and my Sony Clie PDA as my little one that I use for podcasts.
If I had to pick… I’m not sure. I’d like the ability to sync with the iTunes music store (for podcasts, again), but I’d also like a display… My Clie works well for the task, but its battery life is terrible.
I oughta just pick up a LifeDrive–the Palm PDA with a 4 gig hard drive–but the lowest price I see right now is $414.
Eh. I need to save money for schoolbooks right now anyway. Maybe later….
August 20th, 2005 at 6:22 pm
I’ve thought about getting a PDA, but I’m unimpressed with the size of the storage vs. the price. I have over 50 gig of music on my iPod and anything which couldn’t hold all of that plus more doesn’t seen like a good deal right now.
Its a pain to have to break out my laptop to check my schedule and email and I am addicted to gadgets. So why haven’t I run out to buy a PDA?
August 22nd, 2005 at 4:00 pm
Sorry to hear about your Shuffle. Mine’s been working great. I don’t change the music on it very often, so I don’t mind that it’s a little slow. I love it for long trips and such, and for the gym. Yeah, it doesn’t have a display, but at the moment, I can’t afford the $150 difference it takes to get to a Mini, so I love my Shuffle.
A Bean, huh? Yeah, Ok.
August 22nd, 2005 at 4:01 pm
Oh, and BTW, you can get colored cases for the iPod Shuffle.