My review of portable music players

My 2nd review in my new Tech Review series. For regular readers of my technology posts, I won’t be only doing tech reviews I just thought I would kick this off with a couple.

Today I want to talk about the evolution of portable music players and why I still have one. So first off, portable music players have evolved considerably.

AM/FM radios were the first. Then we had Cassette tape players and then the CD playing portable devices. Interesting in that because of their size the AM/FM radio units struggled to get a good signal. The Cassette tape units destroyed the tapes you were listening to, the CD units also over time damaged the CDs.

Up rose the portable music players with a hard drive. At first, the market was flooded with some products. They integrated the concept of portable music stored on the device, and some also offered connections to streaming sources.

These included:

1. Zune (with FM HD Radio and stored music)
2. Sirius XM (with Satellite radio and stored music)
3. FM adapter for some other devices including the iPod
4. Archos (storage music, AM/FM adapters and the ability to get live TV)

My journey was as follows.

1. AM/FM Device used mostly for workouts and replaced about every 5 to 6 months.
2. Next was the Creative Rio I had that in the car for a long time. 20 gigs of music storage was about 2/3’s of my Mp3 backup library then
3. Zune (I had three different Zunes I miss them still)
4. Sirius Portable radio (used for travel, you could use the portable connection and FM broadcast ability to have your radio in the rental car).
5. Ipod Classic
6. Finally the last Device I’ve owned, the Pono Music Player.

I have gotten rid of all of my devices except the Pono. The last two devices I owned are the ones I will rate for this post.

IPod Classic                      8

Pono Music Player          8