Wednesday 12 October 2005

Pic of the day: Is it a tiny bottle? Is it a piece of jewelry? Is it a memory stick? It is a Sony MP3 player with 50 hours of battery life. And there is a reason, or at least an excuse, why I recently bought it.

New gadget

For some months now (perhaps a year? I remember it from the winter sometime, I think) I have had a Creative Zen MP3 player. It fits in the palm of a hand, as long as you don't close the hand. It also fits in a shirt pocket, and some trouser pockets. It has a pretty huge capacity, several times what I have ever considered using. Sadly, it has rather bad batteries. This is the second battery pack I go through, the first only lasted days or perhaps a couple weeks before fading. As in, if I left it OFF overnight, the battery would be flat the next day. The second pack lasted some months, but there isn't much juice now. I take it off the cable and it shows 100% batteries. 25 minutes walk later it shows 5%. This is not good. It is a pretty good reason to not buy stuff from them anymore.

To spite them, and to have an MP3 player that actually lasts longer than my walks, I bought this from Sony. I still have my Sony MD Walkman (or "mini-diskman" as I sometimes call it since MD is short for minidisk). I have had this thing for years, since before MP3 became the craze and killed the budding minidisk format as the next cassette. It can lie around for months unused, and still have a little power left. Once it is recharged, it is good as new, or at least I can't see the difference. Clearly they must use some superior battery technology. Well, this MP3 player has an estimated 50 hours of battery life per recharge, and it recharges really fast off the USB. No battery adapter needed.

(As an aside, I guess I should get myself some labels for my multitude of external power supplies. Some of them don't even have the producer's name on them, and sometimes I have different equipment from the same supplier, like two different HP laptops, and I don't know whether or not they can use each other's mains adapter.)

The Sony MP3 player I've bought has only 512 MB of memory, but it is flash memory rather than hard disk so it takes less power and is very lightweight. And it is still plenty enough for me. I couldn't transfer all my music to it, that's true. But I found out that I don't even want to transfer most of my music. At work I looked around on the dozens of CDs I have stored there over the years. Admittedly I have taken my favorites home earlier, but there are still 50-100 at work. I don't play them there, either. There wasn't a one of the songs that I was interested in putting on my MP3 player. Guess my tastes have changed.

What I have on it is mostly Japanese pop (which is a slightly different style from western pop) and some melodic trance. I also have a few tunes played on pan pipes, very perky rhythm but hauntingly beautiful melodies. That's pretty much it so far. On the old I had various songs by Chris de Burgh, but for reasons unrelated to this topic I don't listen much to him anymore. In fact I don't even listen to Enya much these days, though that may change if I start writing fiction again. (Although this year's NaNovel is inspired by Japanese pop, too. But Enya is very good noveling music. Hint, hint! Join NaNoWriMo as your first step toward authorhood! Or second step, most likely. You know you want to.)

Anyway, that's it. The gadget lives up to its great expectations so far. And I continue walking, and very slowly losing weight, no matter how much I eat. But that's a story for most other days, I guess.