This is the time when there are so many options for us computer freaks that it sometimes overwhelms us. Think back a year and you could not have imagined half the stuff that is going on right now. We were awed by small portable mp3 players that could hold 8-10 songs, we were impressed with the second and third generation portables that added more features and memory but the problem that always manifested itself with every iteration was the limited capacity of SmartMedia cards (the media of choice for portable). These cards ranged from 8MB to 64MB, a fully loaded player with 64MB internal memory and 32MB external memory could hold around 18 songs and a player with 128MB total could hold many 22-24.
What’s the problem? You can always buy more SmartMedia cards. WRONG. SmartMedia is not cheap like donuts, they are actually VERY expensive at around $100-150 for 32-64MB, these are a luxury reserved for the economically prestigious and the rest of us are left with transferring out the old songs and uploading new ones, draining battery life and adding time to an already busy schedule. The smart people over in Korea recognized this problem and designed something along the lines of an mp3 player and a computer in one and created an mp3 player with a built in hard drive to store songs with. Smart idea, right? Not really.
Hard drives as we all know belong inside a computer, which is plugged into a wall, which provides an endless stream of electricity. Hard drives take up an enormous amount of power (that is, when you’re considering the unit being powered with standard AA batteries) when it spins up and spins down, which it does frequently when it accesses songs to put in a buffer. Also, hard drive based players take a while to access songs because it needs to spin up and down to move those files into the buffer memory. Sure, it’s a large amount of memory but would you be willing to have 15 hours of songs of which you can only play 4 hours of before the battery runs dry? Plus, the cost of the drives and technology adds a lot of money to the cost of the players which range from $400-600. Then came the generation of mp3 players/CD players in one. These devices can play mp3 files burned on a CD as well as CD audio. A good idea because they would actually go 8-10 hours without running out of juice and can hold a full 650MB worth of mp3’s and your CD collection as well. With CD media dropping in price, this seems to be one of the better ideas for a player. Today we will look at one suck device made by D-Link Systems called the DMP-CD100
http://www.slcentral.com/reviews/hardware/periph/dlink/dmpcd100/
