Friday, December 01, 2006
I'm in love (with a gadget)
I’ve been eyeing, reading reviews about and shopping around for a video/MP3 player for weeks now. My original intent was to get one for my sweety for Christmas. The little 128MB player she’s using now is a little, well, small. When you’re at the gym you might get tired of the same 25 songs.
Finally an opportunity came up. A brand new Archos Gmini 402 Digital Media Player was offered at $160—about $80 off the normal price I’d been seeing them at. I had to get it. 20GB of storage space completely blows 128MB away, don’t you think?
Well it arrived yesterday. I opened the package and fell in love. Yes it was supposed to be a Christmas gift, but I wasn’t going to wrap it up and wait till the holiday, are you nuts? I was going to charge it up and get it ready for her to use. But I loved it too much to give it up. I asked her if I could keep it, and I would [one day] replace it with an even better model. The screen was a little small for her liking anyway, and battery life wasn’t stellar. But it can play games and, my favorite part of all, you don’t need any frickin’ proprietary software to tranfer files.
[begin rant]
I hate iPods. Everything is proprietary and works only with iPod accessories. You have to use iTunes to transfer stuff. There are third-party programs available so you don’t have to use iTunes, but why do I have to run them when I should be able to attach the thing as a removable hard drive? Drag and drop is so simple, why complicate it with anything else? I was looking at the new Zune too, but they’re worse. Not only do you have to use their special software to transfer files, you have to have Windows XP. My old home computer is still running Windows 2000, so it’s useless. Why exclude segments of your market? Well forget them. They’re just looking for yuppies with money to burn on accessories anyway.
[/end rant]
So anyway, back to my Archos. It’s so cute and feels like a portable game player when I hold it. I wrote up a complete and detailed review, if you’d like to check it out.
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Categories: • Music to my ears • Random acts of geekery