brainwagon

I’ve been trying to get back into exercising at the gym more, which is always a time of intense boredom. I’ve brought my Axim x50v to the gym and used it to listen to podcasts, and my relatively new LG CU500 also works as a pretty good MP3 player, but I thought it might be nice to have a cheap, even lighter device to satisfy my need for amusement while I’m cranking out the mileage on the treadmill.

A quick trip to Best Buy revealed a $40 MP3 player with 512M of memory (enough for my rather modest needs). It’s the Sandisk Sansa m230, a not overly cute but reasonable mp3 player at a near disposeable price. Even at this price point, I wanted a couple of features:

• Display, with backlight. My wife has an iPod Shuffle, which is fine as far as it goes, but the lack of display (as well as the increased price) made it a deal breaker for me.
• Reasonable amount of storage (512M is reasonable).
• Easy “hard disk” interface. I don’t use iTunes, don’t care to use iTunes. I just want to drag music files onto it, and have it work. It does.
• Fast USB 2.0 interface. Life is too short for USB 1.1
• Powered by a single AAA battery

The long and the short of it? It’s got all those features. It even throws in a voice recorder and an FM radio (the FM radio doesn’t appear to be very sensitive, but it’s a nice bonus). The build quality isn’t stellar, but it’s pretty reasonable. At $40, it’s a pretty neat gadget.

[tags]Gadgets,Sansa m230,MP3 Player[/tags]

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 11:27 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.