PHIDONG.COM . 5.0 |
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Thats what I'm feeling right now. I have a lot of stuff coming in this week (hopefully), or that should come in this week:
Exciting.. too much. Can't wait.. come now.
MP3 player shoppingJanuary 17, 2004 - 10:18 AMLast night I figured that if I was going to get serious about Photography, I'd need more memory. 1GB CF Card? Well, the expense is about two hundred dollars, almost.. The answer? A portable hard drive. So after about three hours of searching for information online about an Image Tank or X-Drive (which are essentially portable hard drives with a CompactFlash card in their casings) I came significantly close to purchasing an Image Tank G2 case and a Toshiba 30gb HD. The total price would come out to somewhere around 200-250 dollars since I was setting it up myself (rather than pay 300 for a 30gb Image Tank G2 in a package). I hate how companies try to rip lazy people off. Installing a HDD on an Image Tank G2 is almost as easy as pusshing a floppy disk into your drive. Well, not quite as easy, but all you do is open up a screw and pop the damn thing in. Anyway, continuing one with my whole "should I buy this??" theme, I continued searching around for a better deal (yeah right). For 250 dollars, I can get a pretty good looking MP3 player, but I won't have the ability to transfer my photos to a hard drive to clear up CF card space. One solution? Do both. The X-Drive Pro offers a stunning 1.6 hours of playback time on its sexy iPod lookalike portable photo caddy. To tell you the truth, I was tempted to get it. The price? About the same, they're all about the same! The biggest drawback of the X-Drive pro is that it is just a hard drive photo caddy. It isn't an MP3 player. Vosonic putting an MP3 player on their hard drive case and calling it an MP3 player is the equivalent of me putting a spoiler on my car and calling it a race car. Sorry, doesn't cut it. With a dismal 1.6 hours of playback time (and reported people getting a 1 hour 45 minute best)... the X-Drive Pro looks like a stunning failure. Well, it looks ok.. but its still a failure (as an MP3 player). The primary function and goal of the X-Drive Pro is to record pictures from a CF card, however, which it does well, so I'm not complaining. The reason why I immediately crossed it off my list is because it comes with earbuds. I couldn't live with myself knowing I bought an "mp3 player" that couldn't play mp3s for more than an hour and a half. It'd be like buying a cup and not being able to use it to drink out of unless you only filled it up 1/4 of the way. Definitely something wrong with how I'd feel about the whole thing.. so the sexy Image Tank G2 was still at the top of my list. Until.. the Archos Gmini 120. I guess GMINI could stand for "g-mini" or "gemini".. whatever the case, the Archos Gmini appears to be a X-Drive and Image Tank killer. No case and hard drive to deal with, or dealers trying to rip you off with a package. The 120 only comes in a 20GB flavor, which would suit my needs just fine. Its primary function is mp3 player, but you can download plugins from their site (which are free right now) that allow you to capture images from a CF card and record audio from a mic thats on the drive. The lammest marketing gimmick I've ever seen, definitely, but one of the coolest combo players. If you thought people complaining about the Digital Rebel being just disabled firmware of a 10D in a different body (which is mostly just rumor) think about a MP3 player which has the hardware to handle certain features, but only with the purchase of an upgrade plugin from the site. Horrible marketing. I assume its a good plan to rip people off another 50-100 dollars, but if Archos is seriously planning to unroot iPod, they're going to have to do a little better than that. If they packaged the two plugins (album and sound recording) and included their FM remote, the MP3 player would definitely be a killer package (especially under 300). The neat thing about the FM remote is that you can listen to FM radio (duh), but you can record it as well. By turning on FM radio and listening, you can press REC and begin recording 30 seconds before you press it. That is, the Archos Mini 120 buffers the song/talkshow whatever into its memory and beings recording then. For another 50 dollars, however, maybe some of us can live without the FM radio. So after another 2 hours (total of 5 now) searching around for the G-Mini I decided to take my daily 6 hour nap and get up the next morning. After 6 hours of sleep and dreaming of the new MP3 player, I decided to look some more. Its pretty set in stone, now, that I'm going to be getting a G-Mini, 11 hours after first trying to look for a Compact Flash card. Eleven hours happens to coincidently be the playback time of the gmini 120, which kills the X-drive pro's playback by almost 10 hours. The only thing I have to decide between now is whether to order it online for 210 or just go to the damn store and pick it up for 250 plus tax. I can't decide. |
School againJanuary 9, 2004 - 7:10 AM |
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