Upcoming Players

My sister's birthday is fast approaching. So I started browsing around for a gift. I was thinking of giving her a small mp3 player with a voice recorder (either a SanDisk Rhapsody or a Creative Zen V) so she can use it in school. But since holiday is just beyond the horizon, tech companies are already announcing their new line of toys. That includes mp3 players from Creative Labs and Apple.

The newest, sexiest, mp3 player from Creative.

Apple's line up are pretty much impressive. The iPod Classic's storage capacity is now pushed to a whopping 160GB, the 80GB version had its price cut down to $250, and the iPod Nano is now shorter, squatter, and can play videos. Creative's new player, however, is flash based (which comes in 4, 8, and 16 GB). So it really looks sexy, much sexier than the iPod and less chunkier than the Zen Vision:M. While it can't store files as much as the Vision:M, Creative added one nifty feature:

"...Creative is tacking on one surprising extra that we haven't ever seen in the Zen line: an SD card slot for adding more memory."

Pretty nice, pretty nice. Although I'm quite disappointed at Creative for going flash-based. Now, who's going to compete with the 160GB iPod. Anyways, these players are still too expensive (except for the 80GB iPod). But I'm considering the new Zen (4GB) for my sister.