A Great Little MP3 Player.
Written: Nov 11 '00
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Pros: Great sound, Great concept.
Cons: Headphones.
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| spoalanm's Full Review: Iomega Hipzip 31311 40 MB MP3 Player |
You have to admire the people at Iomega. They have a product called a Click drive which nobody wants. Originally it was supposed to be for photographers who were on vacation and used up the storage on their memory cards. The idea was to download your 8 meg card full of pictures onto a 40 meg Click drive disk at the end of the day. Not a bad idea, especially if you don't have a laptop to bring w/you.
So who can say why a product fails..maybe because larger memory cards for cameras became available, or maybe the idea just never caught on. In any case, does Iomega give up? No! They actually build a product around the already existing disk! They open their eyes and see that MP3s are catching on in a big way. Problem: People have lots of MP3s stored on their hard drives, but how do you carry the MP3s around and listen to them, a la a walkman? You invent a device that uses the disk that you already have in production, but plays MP3s instead of storing photos.
So what? you say..there are lots of MP3 players out there already. Maybe, but many of them have a fixed amount of memory internally, so you can only load just so many songs on, and then you have to switch songs and delete the old songs. With the Iomega system, you can just remove the disk and plug in a new disk. The best part is that the disks are pretty cheap. ($50.00 for a four pack.) CompactFlash cards that the other MP3 players use cost a lot more. For example, you can spend about $200.00 for an extra 64 megas of memory on one of those cards. You get 160 megs of memory here for only $50.00!
Oh yea, about those pesky copyrights..some MP3 players can detect when you grabbed the song off of Napster (and lets face it, how else do most of us get MP3s?) and they delete the song after a while. The Iomega system does not do this. Rip off all the music you want, and this player just becomes your partner in crime.
The sound is unbelievable. The player is about the size of a pack of 100 size cigaretts, and very light. It also comes with a program that plays the MP3s, rips them from CDs and converts the size of them. The smaller the size of the MP3, the more music you can fit on a disk, but the more you reduce the sound quality.
So, if you have a bunch of MP3s on your hard drive, or if you're sick of lugging those CDs around, this is the device to go with. The only drawback is the headphones it comes with. They are supposed to clip onto your ears, but I did not like these and replaced them with over the head Sony headphones.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 300.00
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Epinions.com ID:
spoalanm
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Member: Art Van daLay
Reviews written: 272
Trusted by: 50 members
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