Most of us would turn our noses up at anything less than 1GB in a media player, so it’s hard to consider that only ten years ago early adopters were rocking a measly 32mb of internal storage and a battery life to match (around 2hrs). A contrasting image compared to the iPod Touch with a much hyped, multi-touch display. Steadily players are becoming the swiss army knife of portable media. If it isn’t a fully fledged portable media player, you might be listening to the latest Nickelback track on your phone. Something the 90′s gadgeteer could only dream of.
So, a quick reminisce of my history begins with a one cassette player, a few regular CD players, the obligatory mini-disc player before advancing to mp3 CDs. It was a fairly logical progression, but I was a late adopter of an mp3 player. I didn’t like the thought of carrying around my music library to be limited by the battery life for playback. After tiring of mp3 CDs, I finally bought a Sony NW108; a 1GB flash player, perfect at the time and to some degree still is. But I wanted to diversify, and limit the devices in my pocket. So for a time, I loaded tracks onto a 2GB memory stick to playback on my W810 phone. It was a solution, but not ideal; particularly since I found myself changing tracks on a regular basis. Earlier this year, I solved the problem by purchasing my first iPod. The battery life and capacity were finally what I’d wanted, and I could begrudgingly buy into the Apple brand. Now, I’m keen to move away from buying CDs, and downloading from legal, DRM-free alternatives.
From purchasing £20 worth of CD singles a week to downloading only what I want for less online and selectively filtering my music to taking my entire library with me. Inevitably, a lot’s changed in 10 years. Definitely for the better…
