MP3 players have become more than just devices for listening to your digital music library on the go. Some of today’s advanced players now can become an entire storage drive when plugged into a USB port, much like a flash drive for data storage offering several gigabytes worth. Some high-end MP3 devices earn their own letter when plugged into a PC running windows, making them even more like a flash drive for portable media and data storage. And the ability for better MP3 players to display photos and even videos on their LCD screen took them far beyond simply MP3 players, and made them media players.
What distinguishes MP3 players and media players today is the ability to play video. Media players play music and video, while MP3 players are limited to music playback. Pocket PCs also play all sort of media, but aren’t called media players because they’re technically computers with actual operating systems and micro hard drives. While some mobile purists see the use of a hard drive in technology that small as undesirable, use of a solid state disk is still not cost effective.
Though Pocket PCs certainly qualify as media players, is the internal technology that differentiates it from other portable media players like the video-compatible iPod device from Apple. Pocket PCs now use the more modern micro hard drives that are less prone to failure that the old ones. However, a Pocket PC when used as a media player can be less desirable because of the drive. MP3 players and true media devices without the hard drive can playback music and video much more smoothly as there’s no disk to spin because there’s no drive to read the media from.
While mobile-savvy users view the hard drive as the downfall of Pocket PCs as media players, the battery in these devices will typically wear out long before the piece they believe to be the downfall of the device, the hard drive. The reason some still prefer the Pocket PC as opposed to other MP3 and media players is the cost. Solid state disks, which don’t have moving parts and weigh less, are still extremely expensive for the same amount of storage as a micro hard drive, but cost twice as much. Growing technology is expected to bridge the gap, though, with micro-HDD increasing a little in price as the technology makes them faster, smaller and better options for media players and playback, and the growing popularity of solid state disks, which were only introduced 2 year ago after all, brings their prices down into a more reasonable range.
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