For Roger’s birthday, I picked up a Creative Nomad IIc MP3 player (Note: Creative’s web site isn’t exactly up to date). It took me awhile to settle on which one I wanted to give him. I rarely ever buy electronics without doing some good online research (an exception? TiVo – pure consumer lust). My personal choice would be for a player with 20GB of storage so I can put all of my CDs on the player for those long European trips. Creative makes the Nomad Jukebox 3 with that much space, but Roger wanted something smallish and lightweight that he can take to the gym.
Creative also makes the Nomad MuVo which uses the MuVo memory stick and is about half the size of the Nomad IIc. This seemed cool, but there was no LCD screen so you can see the track listing and skim through it. Another cool thing about the MuVo is that you can plug the memory right into the USB port – no cables and no software needed – the computer thinks it is just another hard drive.
The newest version of the Nomad IIc comes with 128MB of onboard flash memory (it is also available with 64MB and 32MB for less money). It also has a Smart Media expansion slot able to read up to the 128MB Smart Media cards (currently around $40-50 ea.). I liked this feature since my digital camera also uses Smart Media and if we ever upgrade then we know what we can do with the old ones. Plus Smart Media are small and compact and if you but a bulk pack of them it still comes out smaller than a stack of CDs.
So to sum up, I felt that the Nomad IIc offered a good balance between size, functionality, features, and expandability perfect for Roger. He seems to like it too.
Anyone else have experience with MP3 players?