Related link: http://www.jensofsweden.com/
My wife has a 4GB iPod I bought her two years ago for her birthday. It’s slick, and she loves it. I’ve always wanted to wait for the right music player before taking the plunge myself, but no model of iPod has ever really tempted me, least of all the iPod shuffle. Looking elsewhere, I think I found my dream player.
A recent comment in the O’Reilly Weblogs directed me to Jens of Sweden. All I could say is “wow”. The Jens players are svelte, gorgeous, reasonably priced, and very functional. The one that caught my eye was the MP-120. If I’m doing my currency conversion rightly, it’s a great deal at just under $200 MSRP for 1GB of songs, as well as all its other great features.
The MP-120 is very compact (certainly on the iPod shuffle scale) and yet seems to has a nice display. Sorry, but there’s no way in hell I’m buying a music player without a display. Even more importantly, it plays OGG Vorbis, hands down my music format of choice, which means I won’t have to go to additional lengths to encode my songs for it (the suggestions for playing OGG Vorbis on iPod read like encephalectomy instructions). It’s designed to work well in Linux as well as Windows (not that I care) and OS X (I would like to grab some songs from my wife’s collection on Mac). It uses USB 2.0 (high speed) for data transfer. All perfect for me. I checked around the Net for user reviews, and they seem to be very positive.
But there’s a catch. I can’t seem to find the bloody things anywhere in the US. I think I found some places that stock the older MP-110, but not my particular dream kit. Preliminary search hasn’t revealed any vendor that clearly would sell/ship to me in the U.S. I guess worst case I can keep my eyes peeled while in Amsterdam for XTech 2005. But there’s very little doubt about it, from the specs and reviews I see. I’ll be having one of those sweet machines this year. I guess side by side with Lori’s iPod, I’ll at least be able to make a more informed comparison.
Do you know how to get an MP-120 in the U.S.?
a non-Mac addict allowed to post here??
Must be April fool's.
a non-Mac addict allowed to post here??
Ha ha. Actually, it ocurred to me right after I posted it that some people might get the (wrong) impression from today's date. No. I have no Avril poisson to sell. My post was entirely sincere. And yes, the ORA blogs do seem to be a hotbed of Mac advocacy. I see nothing wrong with that, but my own background as an ORA blogger is more along XML/Python/Linux lines, as you can see from my posting history, so i guess I get to be a Mac neutral.
I bought my wife an iMac and an iPod a few years ago, in part because I knew it would be a better machine for her to do the sorts of (non-techie) things she does with computers, and in part because I wanted to try it out a bit myself. Turns out OS X is not really to my taste, but despite some glitches (some of which I've blogged here), I think I mde the right choice for her. It's refreshing how little tech support I have to do for her. I do find the recent postings here about great developers migrating to OS X rather hard to credit. I don't find OS X a very friendly environment for development at all, and some of my colleagues (brilliant developers all) who made the OS X switch have come to regret it. But hey, to each his own.
--Uche
I can send you one if you like
Just drop me an email, so we can discuss details and what it'll cost.
Contact asgeirn at gmail.