For its first venture into consumer gadgets, Intel's Pocket Concert Player is loaded with features, and is one of the easiest-to-use portable players around. Dare you try out a WMA player from chipzilla?
Even if Intel's first portable digital audio player only had 128MB of built-in storage going for it, it'd be noteworthy in a product category where 64MB is the norm. But the Pocket Concert Audio Player has much more to recommend than just its generous supply of memory, including an FM tuner, a graphic equaliser, and a great set of headphones. The only real flaw with the unit is there's no memory expansion, but the onboard storage should satisfy most consumers.
It's a generally accepted rule that it's best to steer clear of the first version of any computing product. Let them work out the kinks, or so the thinking goes. But in the case of the new Pocket Concert Audio Player, Intel has managed to come up with a winner right out of the starting gate. The Pocket Concert Player is loaded with features, is hands down one of the easiest-to-use portable players, and, on top of it all, is an excellent value.
The Pocket Concert's trump card is its 128MB of built-in memory -- twice that of nearly all the other portable players on the market with the exception of those based on the Iomega PocketZip disks (which come standard with 80MB of storage). Intel accomplished this by using its StrataFlash memory, which the company claims is more compact, less costly, and less power-hungry than competing storage formats.
The only major disadvantage to the Pocket Concert's storage arrangement is that the player has no expansion slot. However, the built-in storage is sufficient for as much as 4 hours of music (encoded at 96Kbps in Windows Media [WMA] format) or 20 hours of spoken-word audio, according to Intel.
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