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[blindipod] The current status of portable media devices in 2007

From: "Brian Hartgen" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blindipod@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:28:21 -0000
Hi

As usual at this time of year, I wanted to try and give a summary of the 
current status of our access to portable media devices during 2007, and it has 
been an interesting year.  Clearly these views are my own but some of them may 
give rise to discussion points on the list.

Before getting to that, I just want to say that the Portable Player Portal is 
still a site which is well used and referred to not only through discussions on 
mailing lists but also within on-line resources which is tremendous.  I shall 
continue to update it during 2008 as will be seen below.

I think there were three major milestones during this year and perhaps several 
smaller developments which have had an impact in this area.

First was the launch of the Zen Stone media player - Creative's take on the 
Apple iPod Shuffle you might say.  This is still available for 20 pounds and is 
very accessible.  Officially folders cannot be voice tagged, although a clumsy 
method of such tagging could be achieved by recording an MP3 file within each 
folder voicing its name and ensuring it played first in the sequence.  

I will not document all the advantages and disadvantages of the player as they 
can be read on the Portable Player Portal web site, but it is worth saying that 
from an accessibility and affordability standpoint this is still a good quality 
player for what it does.

Next came the Victor reader Stream.  From the perspective of listening to 
speech, this is such a great product.  Because it is a specialist player, you 
would expect all of its functions to be accessible via speech prompts and 
indeed they are.  The recent firmware update to play Audible books is very 
welcome and it has to be one of the most flexible players which can deliver 
Audible content including its ability to play books at varying speeds.  

I agree with Steve Nutt's recent comments to this list that there are no 
specialist players available right now which deliver high quality music 
playback that are "feature rich" in that area unless you want to move into the 
arena of specialist PDA's.  The Stream lacks many qualities in the music 
playback arena and that includes adequate music reproduction quality and other 
things which I have documented on the Portal site.  But if you had to make a 
choice about a player to purchase which can meet many needs, the stream is 
undoubtedly a very popular choice. 

Neal Ewers has produced an excellent audio review of the Stream and I will be 
writing to ask him whether we can link to it from the Portal site.

The third thing I am glad to note is that mobile (or cell) phones, such as the 
Nokia N95, are being considered more favourably as portable media devices.  
Such devices are the only current players available which give you, (in the 
area of music reproduction):
* Very high sound quality,
* The ability to be able to vary the graphic equalisation,
*   The delivery of features allowing you to vary the playing order,
* To be able to copy tracks immediately to the player without the need for 
"voice tagging" folders or individual music tracks, to name but the principal 
aspects.

When you have Talks installed for example on such a device, you are well 
equipped with an excellent music player and it would be difficult to see how 
you could improve upon the flexibility given by such a combination.  However, 
such a solution is expensive and I would find it difficult to understand a 
person purchasing this system if he or she was not going to use it as a phone 
in addition to a music player.  Moreover, while there is Audible support 
available, the last time I looked you could not vary the speed of the playback 
which to many of us is a very important factor and this also applies very much 
to the playback of Podcasts.  The manufacturers of the more specialist devices 
do recognise that important requirement and some of them such as Humanware give 
us the ability to vary the speed according to taste withthe advantage that 
normal playback can be resumed at any time to clarify some spoken word if 
needed.

The great thing is that Napster to Go, (Napster Music's facility for allowing 
you to download music directly to a portable device and play it), is capable of 
being used by a Nokia N95 in particular.  Don't forget on the Portal site we 
have a tutorial on getting the most from Napster with a screen-reader if anyone 
would like to download it.  A page devoted to the N95 will also be included in 
the new year.

Moving to other matters, on this list I have not been able to discuss the 
capabilities of the Pac Mate Omni's considerable music management and high 
quality playback capabilities because it has only recently become available, 
but I look forward to doing that in the months ahead.

Finally to iTunes.  Very little progress has been made in this regard, except 
that a recent change ensured that iTunes would once again function with later 
releases of JAWS which helped the J-Tunes product a little.

If anyone else has any particular highlights of 2007 I am sure we would all be 
pleased to read them.  Meanwhile, have a very happy new year and let's hope 
that 2008 gives us even more access to portable audio.

Brian Hartgen
Follow-Ups:

[blindipod] Re: The current status of portable media devices in 2007
From: Steve Nutt
[blindipod] The current status of portable media devices in 2007

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