Category: Gear | Portable Media Players

You have been eating like Michael Phelps for years, but now it's time to start actually working off some of those calories in the pool. Rather than listening to the sounds of your own splashing, the XtreaMP3 lets you bring your own music into the pool or any other body of water near you that isn't frozen solid. It's completely waterproof up to 15-feet and holds 1 GB of music. The player straps around your arm and can stand up to even the most extreme water sports. It has a built-in rechargeable battery that will give you about 8-hours of juice per charge and the controls are easy to navigate without looking so you can change the track in a hurry in case the Jaws theme song comes on and you get really scared. $149.

The hype for Apple's tablet computer has been pretty much inescapable for the past few weeks. Now, it's out and the iPad is essentially an iPod Touch that uses Mark McGwire's trainer. The 9.7-inch capacitive screen is the same size as Amazon's Kindle, but it's full color and supports 720p HD video. It has a couple of swanky new apps, including a full-featured e-book store, a greatly improved iTunes experience and a revamped iWork suite in case you actually get around to doing some work on it. It's designed to fit in the hole left in your life between your cell phone and your laptop. Pricing is a little steep, with the low-end 16 GB model checking in at $499, the 32 GB model coming in at $599 and the big daddy 64 GB version demanding $699. If you want 3G wireless data, so you can, you know, use the internet when you're not near a WiFi connection, you'll have to add $130 to the asking price, plus $30 a month for unlimited access to the AT&T network. Even though it doesn't live up to the hype it generated, it sure beats the pants off of most other portable media player options out there.

At last week's Consumer Electronics Convention, you couldn't throw a netbook without it landing on a big pile of new e-book readers. Most of them suffer from two distinct problems. First, they're all pretty much the same and boring. Secondly, all of them are starting the race well behind Amazon's e-book behemoth, Kindle. Now, they have given it another upgrade, adding global wireless to their larger DX model. Most of the other specs are the same, keeping the 9.7-inch e-ink screen, and storage for up to 3,500 books. But, they have jacked up the battery life from four days to a full week on a single charge and, of course, now it will be able to connect to 3G data in more than 100 countries, so you can pretend to be a literary-type all over the world. $489, not including the jacket with leather elbow patches.

We often wonder how people got by before personal media players. What did they do on long commutes? How did they ignore everyone on public transportation? Did people suffer through the horrible techno music they play at the gym? These are questions we never want answered. And thanks to this handful of awesome gadgets, we'll never have to.

iPod Nano with Camera

Apple's painfully small player has always been a leader in its field, but this year, Apple stuck a surprisingly capable little camera into the mix. It still comes in all those snazzy colors and does everything you'd expect an iPod Nano to do, including play nice with the Nike+ system. Just don't forget it in your back pocket.

Zune HD

Microsoft took a mulligan on the Zune, giving it a beautiful OLED touchscreen display that is easily one of (if not the) best on the market. It works with the Zune Marketplace subscription service and has an HD radio receiver built-in, just in case you still like your music broken up by ridiculous and often terrible DJ banter. You can't win ELO tickets listening to your MP3 collection.

Sony X Series Walkman

Its 3-inch OLED screen and 33 hour (music) battery life make it a darkhorse in the portable media player race. It's more expensive than its competitors, but it also comes with a high-quality pair of noise-canceling headphones that won't end up in the trash next to all those white ear buds you've been discarding.

Sandisk Sansa Clip+

It's not the only player with a built-in clip, but this pint-sized rocker has something its tiny buddies don't: A screen. It has a built-in memory card slot for adding more memory and it works with Sandisk's slotRadio format. Plus, it has a voice recorder for covert spy missions or particularly hilarious telemarketer pranks.

Creative Zen X-Fi Wireless

The origial Creative Zen was a great little player, but they upped the anti by adding their X-Fi technology which de-crappifies your MP3 files, filling in the sonic gaps left by the transition from disc to digital. It also has expandable memory and supports more video file types than the rest on our list so the list of stuff you can watch to get thrown off a bus is much larger.

Sure, it's got a beautiful 3.3-inch touch-screen and plays HD video, but the Zune's real iPod-slaying spec: $15 a month gets you all the music you can download. From $219

SandDisk did everything they could with the new Clip to make it small enough to compete with the horde of anorexic players on the market without skimping on the stuff you really need, like a screen. Inside its minuscule body you'll find an FM tuner, a voice recorder and anywhere between two and eight gigs of storage (The one we're giving away is a 4 GB in Blue). If that's not enough space, there's a built-in memory card slot that lets you up your storage on the fly. It's also compatible with their slotRadio and slotRadio cards, which are just one more way for you to tell CDs to take a hike. $39-$69.

Despite having a 2.4-inch color LCD screen and a speaker loud enough to rouse the cops, the Squeezebox is extremely compact. Stream endless tunes via Wi-Fi from Internet Radio, subscriber music services, and your iTunes collection. $199

If you have ever looked at your iPod Nano and screamed, "Why aren't you a video camera?" then today is a good day for you. The new iPod Nanos comes with a bigger 2.2-inch screen and has a 640x480 video camera built right in. There's also a pedometer and an FM tuner in case you haven't been getting enough FM radio mixed in with the music you actually like. They're still tiny and come in a variety of different colors, but if you have any sense at all, you'll man up and get black.

The older version of Creative's X-Fi media player was certifiably awesome, but the new version sports a 2-inch touch-sensitive TFT LCD screen that makes it as slick as anything currently sitting on the shelf at your local electronics store. Like all of Creative's other players, it supports a whole heap of audio and video formats and has a built-in FM radio in case you like your music with a nice mix of DJ blather. The X-Fi tech helps restore some of the quality your tracks lost when they made the transformation into MP3s and there's even a MicroSD slot for adding more storage. The 8GB model starts at just $129, with the 16GB and 32GB models ringing up for $179 and $229 respectively. That makes the Zen substantially cheaper than its main competition. That means you'll have money left over to buy Windex to clean your filthy fingerprints off the screen.

It's not often you get to call Microsoft "the little guy," but when it comes to portable media players, the iPod is pretty much their daddy. They're hoping to change that with Zune HD, though, which has a smaller screen than the iPod touch, but runs at the same resolution, making it look extra crisp. Plus, it has a built-in HD radio receiver and can play HD video on an HDTV using the optional dock. When a sentence has the letters, "HD" in it that many times, you know it has to be good. You can pre-order the 8 GB ($219) or the 32 GB ($289) version now, for delivery on September 15.