Rick’s Rants and Raves

I really don’t mind being a late adopter. I like letting technology mature before I take the dive. I’m intrigued by the possibilities, and I am typically aware of the trends. However, I generally don’t spend my hard earned cash until an equilibrium has been reached between price and features.

For example, I recently acquired a DVR from my cable company as part of a package deal. When I compared that package against packages from competitors, I was essentially getting the DVR for free. That’s what I call equilibrium. I’m comfortable that my mother has had a DVR for over a year now, while I have not. My family simply doesn’t watch that much TV, so it hasn’t been a priority.

But last night, I realized just how late my adoption of an MP3 player had come: not only did my wife and daughter have one before me, my mother nearly beat me to it. She asked me to come help her learn how to use it. Fortunately, I already have one…

A month or so ago, I bought a refurbished Sansa e250 from Woot.com for only $50. I’ve been very pleased with the purchase, especially considering I did it with very little research (which is what Woot’s business model counts on). Here are some of the pluses of this particular player:

• 2GB internal storage that doubles as a flash drive. That’s 400 songs, which is a fair bit of the stuff I care about.
• Micro SD card slot. Since I can get a 2GB Micro SD for only $25 (at the time of writing), that means I could have a $75 4GB player. The equivalent iPod Nano is still $200, and doesn’t play video.
• The e250 is capable of playing video if you don’t mind converting it to its supported format. On my PC, it takes about 45 seconds to convert each minute of video. The only annoyance is that the smaller resolution quicktime file ends up taking more disk space than the original.
• There’s a pretty decent Free Open Source firmware for it called RockBox. The user interface leaves a little bit to be desired, especially when manipulating play lists, but it has a much deeper feature set than the stuff that came on the e250. And it has GAMES! It will even play Gameboy (Advance and color) games if you have the .gbc file. And of course, the ultimate in geek, It Plays Doom.
• The battery life has been fabulous.

One final complaint: FM transmitters seem to nearly universally suck. And why don’t any of them actually list their transmit power? A week transmit power would probably lead to a poorer signal strength. A strong transmit power would indicate a better likelihood of downing out the noise prevalent in most cities.