|
|
| Product: HipZip |
Company: Iomega |
| Web: www.iomega.com |
Phone: 888-516-8467 |
| Platform: Your hip (plays nice with both Mac/Windows USB) |
SRP: US$300
Street Price: same |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
Ever since discovering the joys of Napster and MP3.com, I've been jonesin' for a portable MP3 player. Unfortunately I had two problems. One, as a proud member of the Macintosh Minority, it didn't seem like many of the players out there had the right stuff to support me. Secondly, with over 2 gigs of MP3s stashed on my hard drive, the measly 64 megs most of players didn't seem like nearly enough. Then I heard about the new HipZip from Iomega and I knew my digital music ship had come in.
Basically, the HipZip is the portable music player incarnation of Iomega's not-so-successful Clik drive, a failed attempt at creating a 40MB removable storage medium for digital cameras and laptops. And while I know a few folks who have one and love it, most people apparently thought that 40 megs just wasn't enough for removable media these days.
Instead of killing the line, Iomega did the smart thing...they turned it into an MP3 player. And in doing so, they solved all my problems and a lot of the problems other MP3-ophiles out there probably have, too.
First, the unit. It's a cool purple and gray-skinned curvy rectangle about the size of a pack of cigarettes...closer to the 100's size. There's a proprietary USB port, "lock" slider, and charger input on one side, a two-way rocker switch and rubber-coated button on the other, and the front sports two more simple buttons (one on/pause and one off), a small monochrome LCD screen and another rocker that functions as a forward/reverse switch. That's about it. It's got a built-in lithium ion battery that charges in about 2 hours and a mini headphone jack. The top flips up and contains a slot for the ever-so-cute Clik disc. Overall, its simple, intuitive and straight to the point.
Using it couldn't be simpler: pop a disc in, turn it on, hit "play" and go. You can fast forward or reverse within songs or skip backwards and forwards with the little rocker switch. Internal configurations for repeat/random, screen backlight on/off, simple equalization, and playlist management are controlled using a combination of the side button and up/down rocker switch (which doubles as a volume control).
As is true with so many Iomega products, reading the manual isn't really necessary. Once I got the unit out of the box and installed the latest Iomega disc drivers off of the CD-ROM, I was ready to go. Plugging the USB cable into the back of my G3 Powerbook, I plugged in to the unit, stuck in a disc, turned it on, and watched the disc mount on my desktop just like any other. A quick drag-and-drop and I had files loaded in a jiffy. To delete files, just drag 'em to the Trashcan. Easy!
In this age of digital video and hard drive-hogging games, 40 megs might not seem like much, but for digital music, its fine. I can get about 15-20 songs encoded at 96K onto each disc and I've loaded about 100+ minutes of decent sounding spoken word onto the Clik discs that came with the unit. Since I bought mine at BestBuy during a special, I got an additional 4 discs for free...a US$50 value. Sweet!
My only gripes? First of all, skipping to a section within a long file (as is the case with many spoken-word discs) takes a LONG time. I wish there was a way to randomly-access by time, but for music its not a big deal. Secondly (and not so minor a point), $300 smackers is a bit steep, but was made a little more palatable by the free discs I got.
If you've been waiting to buy an MP3 player, have a lot of music to store, like the idea of removable media, and can afford it, HipZip's the way to go. Of course, this thing'll probably be $100 bucks by this time next year, but if you're gonna be on the bleeding edge, expect to...well...bleed a bit.
- Sean Carton [10/13/00]
Check out:
Today's Tech Term
Today's Software on Cool Tool of the Day
Street Tech's Digital Living Today
|
