MP3 Summer Buying Guide

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In the need of an MP3 player

Millions of people have stopped buying music in its physical format and choose to download (legally or not) their favourite tunes. Digital music is more portable, easier to organize, and much simpler to mix and match than those precious shiny silver discs.

Well this is the easy part. Finding the perfect MP3 player is the hard one. Considerations of size, color, capacity, features, price, and compatibility, all need to be weighed before making a decision. Unfortunately, there's no perfect MP3 player for everyone.

After a lot of testing and many second thoughts, we are able to present you 6 models, all with different characteristics and pricing, which we thing are of the best in their field.

A model for everyone, a quick look

There are MP3 players for everyone, from the cheap but very, very decent, Crypto Muvi 18, to Creative’s solid Zen Stone, which basically is an iPod Shuffle, but costs almost the half.

Philips also wants to have her share in the market with its GoGear Aria, an 8 GB, value for money, model. Sony, the company that introduced the Walkman, couldn’t be left outside this guide, as it has entered the MP3 market with some very impressive models, one of them being the NWZ-S639F, which is the 16GB version of Sony's Walkman S630 series.

Creative makes another entry in our feature with the Zen X-Fi, an incredible value given its low price, which also carries an SD card expansion slot.

It would be a big surprise though if we didn’t feature the king of the MP3 market, the iPod Classic, a device which "altered the landscape for portable audio players" coming with a huge 120 GB storage capacity meaning that you can stores up to 35,000 songs. Let’s now have a closer look to these models, all their pros, the cons, their ups and the downs.

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