Mobile Music Musings

After my walk tonight, I’ve learned two things:

1. PocketPCs make awful portable MP3 players.

There’s nothing wrong with the quality of the sound from my V37, it’s the little quirks of it being a PDA first, music player second. The built-in media player has a stupid little ‘feature’ where any touch of the screen while a song is playing will cause it to pause, and while I’m walking along with the V37 jostling around in my pocket, the screen is getting touched a lot. Even if I minimize the media player, something else is going to get triggered by all those screen touches. I had to put the ebook reader up just because it has relatively few ‘hot spots’ on the screen to trigger.

Every touch of the screen causes beeps and clicks to pop up in the middle of the song, too, and although they can be disabled it’s a pain to have to do so temporarily just for these walks. There’s a similar problem with the buttons on the front of the unit — until I disabled them, it would constantly be switching between the built-in apps, scribbling garbage into each of them. A better case might help, but all of the cases I can find for this unit block the earphone jack, so I have to leave it exposed.

The shuffle feature of the player also seems pretty weak. The resulting playlist still has a lot of songs by the same group clustered together. There are better player programs out there, but they cost money of course, and won’t fix all of these problems. And 256 megs of memory doesn’t really cut it anymore. It’s more than enough for a walk, but I don’t want the hassle of syncing it up and loading a new playlist every day.

2. Earbuds just don’t cut it for walking about.

The wind and the traffic are heavy enough in this area that I had to crank the volume up a fair bit just to be able to hear the songs, but the earbuds are deep in enough that it was on the verge of causing an earache. Also, the slightest tugs on the wires would loosen them enough that I was constantly readjusting them through the whole trip.

If I really want to have music on my walks, I’m clearly going to need a better player and a proper set of headphones, so it’s time to do some research. The iPod is the traditional choice, but there are some interesting new models coming out like the iHP-120 and the Rio Karma. Now when was I scheduled to win that lottery…