Apple's iPod may not be the king of music players

What's this? Apple's iPod may be losing market share? Well, that maybe the case in Japan where Sony's MP3 players are taking a bite out of Apple's iPod. Sony really wants to beat Apple at its own game, cause Sony started the revolution in music players with the tape Walkman and then the CD Walkman. Sony has a Network Walkman, that resembles a cigarette lighter, which before could only play Sony's proprietary ATRAC format, but now can play MP3s. Personally, I would like to have an MP3 player like the Network Walkman that could have the battery life even better than the iPod and can store as much MP3s as the iPod. Mind you, the iPod is a hard drive based MP3 player and the Network Walkman is a flash memory based player. But the way I see it, unless you really need to take 20 gigs of music with you at a time (I suppose if you're going on a plane trip or a long trip that requires more than 8 hours), you won't be listening to that continuously. Because remember, every so often, you will change the music and upload a different set of MP3s to the player.

Right now, I have the RCA Kazoo which I like because it's small, however it only supports 64 MB internal memory, but accepts a MMC memory card. So I have a 64MB MMC card to give me a total of 128MB of memory for MP3s. I can probably load up to maybe 28 songs on the player. It's ok for a train ride. Mind you, I always have to recharge my batteries (using AAA rechargeable nickel metal hydride) every 2-3 days. Lately, I've been having problems uploading songs with the newest MusicMatch software, I've never had this problem before on the older MusicMatch software. I really want to now get a new MP3 player, I've had the Kazoo for about 3 years now. I am thinking, should I get an iPod Mini or iPod, or go for a Sony Network Walkman, or even the iAudio X5 (which I've heard some good things about).

I've also tried to play MP3s on my Palm Zire 71 (which is discontinued) too, but the quality is not very good. I use a software audio player called pTunes (similar to iTunes) which works great (I can play in the background and turn the Palm off), the only problem is that the audio quality sucks in that the default volume is very low. I can increase the volume by increasing the dB level, but that distorts the audio significantly. I think the Zire 71 has a hardware issue where it doesn't really do audio that well. So that's why I get a MP3 player. Some of you might say, get a converged device that can play audio, do Palm stuff, and cell phone. My response would be a converged device is not that good because you sacrifice on one of the features. It maybe a good Palm, but the cell phone features will not be as good. There will be compromises on a converged device to afford the convenience.

Technorati tags: iPod, Apple, MP3, Sony