Music Player

As flash memory card capacity increases exponentially and prices fall equally fast, manufacturers are looking for new ways to innovate. SanDisk, one of the world’s biggest makers of memory products, has partnered with the Billboard charts in order to compete with music players like the iPod. The SanDisk slotRadio is a small, stylish player that comes bundled with a micro SD flash card pre-loaded with 1000 chart-topping songs for just USD$99.99. It’s certainly great value, but the big drawback is the music won’t play on anything else.  Read More

Listening to music became a truly personal experience when Sony first introduced the Walkman all those years ago. Technological advances since then have seen music players store more songs, become more compact and include color screens - and now they're even beginning to liberate themselves from the shackles of the battery. To achieve its battery free charge, the Chukka Kinetic Music Player combines electromagnetic induction with a unique design that positively encourages the user to twirl it around the fingers, throw it about and otherwise toy with it. The result - an eco-friendly personal media player that also gives you the recognized stress relieving benefits of tactile interaction and repetitive physical motion.  Read More

There's no denying that digital music has revolutionized the way we buy and listen to our music. There is a cost to pay for such convenience though as the most widely available download formats suffer from loss of sound quality to varying degrees. This is where digital music players like the Olive Opus 4 come in, offering the superior sound quality of CD and the functionality of a digital music player in one unit. Enjoying lossless sound and practicality of use does seem to come hand in hand with a hefty financial outlay, so is it worth it?  Read More

As personal music players like the iPod become ubiquitous, there’s another developing trend that’s even more insidious: the desire to share that music with everyone else. Miini speakers are flooding the market at the moment, but a new product called the Kerchoonz K-box promises to make even more noise. A compact, mobile-phone sized device, the K-box turns any flat surface – wall, table, window, ceiling – into a giant speaker.  Read More

When it comes to ultra-compact portable music players, for many the choice "du jour" has been the ubiquitous iPod Shuffle. Apple’s minute MP3 players have consistently offered an attractive price point and ever diminishing size with each generation of Shuffle, which has allowed the pocket player to claim the lion’s share of the market. Here to give them a run for their money is the Archos 2 portable music player, which packs a punch with size, specs and price.  Read More

OK it’s not on the Inspector Gadget scale of ingenuity, but five cool functions in one pair of sunnies from the Xonix Watch Company still gets the gadget gene in us twitching. When you’re not simply wearing them to shield your eyes from the sun – which is one of its functions – the sports-designed sunglasses also serve as a video recorder, camera, music player and memory storage device. Built-in memory of up to 16GB caters for up to eight hours of AVI format video capture or up to 160,000 images depending on the resolution, which peaks at a less than awe-inspiring 2.0 megapixels.  Read More

The concept of the Boombox is no doubt reminiscent to many of our readers of people walking the streets with large objects the size of a sheep on their shoulder, doing irreparable damage to their hearing and conveying their lack of taste to everyone within shooting distance. Those readers, like yours truly, should get set for a brain reconfiguration with this story. The US$300 Logitech Squeezebox Boom all-in-one network music player looks like a boombox but it ain’t – it has an integrated amplifier, high-performance speakers and an 802.11g wireless network connection. With it you can listen to your digital music in any room of your home. There are no wires to connect. Just plug it into a power outlet. Then, using your existing home network, you can listen to the music on your computer, podcasts, Internet radio stations, and subscription services, even when the computer is off.  Read More

December 19, 2007 Denon has announced the release of the S-52 wireless network CD music system which features the ability to stream audio either via Ethernet or wireless from Internet radio sources, together with other network attached storage devices including computers on the network.  Read More

December 26 , 2005 Toyota announced today that it has begun nationwide sales in Japan of the completely redesigned bB passenger vehicle through "Netz" dealers. The first-generation bB, launched in 2000, was developed as an individualistic, compact hatchback—a completely new genre. Its sense of presence, apparent at a single glance, and its spacious, comfortable interior suitable for a diverse range of uses proved popular among younger customers. The New bB retains the strengths of the previous bB and strives to embody the lifestyle of people who want to be surrounded by music everywhere they go, adopting the development theme of "A Car-shaped Music Player" to satisfy the preferences of the younger generation.  Read More