Bluejake

After the sudden and inexplicable death of my Creative Labs MuVo, I seriously considered abandoning the MP3 player market and switching back to Minidisk players. A good friend of mine recently purchased the Sony Sport Minidisk player, and has been having good results with it- apparently you can get like 750mb of MP3s or WMAs on a single minidisk. However, when I picked it up, the player seemed a little heavy for the gym, and I felt the greater storage capacity and reliability did not offset the inconvenience of carrying the extra weight. I decided to give the MP3 player market one last try, and on the advice of CNET and a bunch of other sites, I decided to purchase the strangely named Nike psa[play 120. Once I got past the odd placement of the bracket in the title, I found a lot of things to like about the player: 96mb of storage (after I added a 32mb MMC card from my old Compaq Ipaq player), an excellent rubberized case, and a cool headphone remote with a full display. Once I figured out where to position the clip-on remote, I found the player performed well. It had a nice range of sound, even on the weak headphones included with the player. The controls on the device are intuitive and easy to use, with some functions duplicated on the main case and on the remote. Some drawbacks: the player included a nice arm-band holder for the gym, but I found that it wasn't that comfortable when I lifted weights. On some MP3s encoded at 64kbps there was significant file corruption that crashed the player and forced me to reboot by removing the battery. The clip on the remote is oddly shaped, which limits the number of places you can position it. Still, overall the player performs well, looks good, and is well sized for working out at the gym.

Overall grade: B+

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