Bluejake

My old Compaq Ipaq MP3 player died at the gym the other day, so I decided to look for a new one. I wanted to get the smallest MP3 player I could find- something about the size of a Wheat Thin, and definitely no larger than a Triscuit. The guy at Circuit City wasn't really familiar with the size of these popular snack crackers, but he was able to direct me to the Creative Labs MuVo. It's about the size of a pack of Tic-Tacs. The device breaks into two parts and plugs directly into the USB port of any computer. It does double duty as both an MP3 player and a file storage device, and the $129 model I bought carries about 64MB of memory. The included earphones are pretty weak, but with a better pair the sound quality is acceptable for the gym or walking around on the street. I like the stripped down controls- basically you have forward, back, on/off, and volume buttons, and that's about it. No display means it gets about 12 hours of playing time on a single AAA battery.

The only drawback I've been able to find is the way files are transferred onto the device. Basically you plug in the USB half of the unit, and it appears as a normal removable drive. The transfer speed is acceptable- somewhere around 6 or 7 minutes to write the entire 64mb card. Unfortunately, if you just drag and drop MP3s or WMA files you don't have any way to choose the compression setting- the files are just copied exactly as they are on the hard drive. If you want to take advantage of compression, you have to transfer the files using Windows Media Player or a similar program.

Overall rating: B+ F (see below):

Updated 10/24: a week after I bought my MuVo it just stopped turning on. It worked fine when connected to the USB port on the computer, but it wouldn't turn on or operate when connected to the battery. I also noticed some other problems: the buttons are a little flimsy, there is no 'hold' option to prevent accidently turning the device on, and all the inserting and removing of the USB component into the battery seems like it could damage one or both pieces. I'm not sure if that is what happened in this case, but I'd avoid purchasing the MuVo until they fix some of these problems. Luckily, Circuit City has a great return policy. I lost the receipt and the packaging, but they accepted it without complaint and gave me a full refund in cash.

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