Prototype of a Person

What’s the next gadget that you want to buy?

Today’s Science Week submission… because I enjoyed writing one yesterday and if I have a chance I’ll do tomorrow’s (Which invention has helped you most with your working life?) and Saturday’s (In your opinion what was the best invention in 2007?) too.

An mp3 player that isn’t an iPod…

Ask anyone about MP3 players and obviously the iPod is perceived as the ubiquitous model. This is the work of incredible marketing on the part of Apple and despite masses of criticism (quick battery death, difficult repairs etc.,) the iPod has managed to outsell its competitors, even when the likes of Creative and Archos seem steps ahead of Apple in terms of quality, durability and innovative thinking. These are some of the reasons that the next gadget I want to buy will be the new Creative Zen.

The Creative Zen is a flash based mp3 player, similar to the iPod Nano, both of which are very different to the iPod Classic model which is a hard drive based player. There are some major differences between flash based players and hard drive based players, it’s not only price and size, durability is the key.

Hard Drive based mp3 players

A hard disk drive (HDD) stores your data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Picture the internal components of an iPod (or any other hard drive based player) as a small disk, spinning continuously as your songs load and play, quite similar to a CD spinning in a discman. You can even feel the slight vibrations of the disc when holding an iPod in your palm. These moving parts make the iPod quite fragile, especially if you drop the device while it is in use.

Flash Memory based mp3 players

Flash memory is a solid state storage drive (SSD), meaning that everything is electronic rather than mechanical like in a hard drive. This indicates that there are no actual moving parts, making flash based mp3 players more resilient to both dropping and everyday use. It is for this reason that flash based players are favoured by joggers and athletes.

The iPod Touch, Nano and Shuffle are all flash based players and in comparison to their more popular counterpart the price to storage space ratio is far higher. For example the 16gb Nano is €199 and the Classic 80gb is €249. Flash players might be more expensive than hard drive players, but they’ll certainly outlive any hard disk players on the market (this is especially true for iPods, having been criticised heavily for their seemingly built-in obsolesce).

This is where the Creative Zen comes back into consideration. It has an SD memory card slot which gives you unlimited media storage possibilities. The idea being that when your Zen becomes full you simply buy a memory card(s) for it. The latest SD memory cards are available in up to 32GB in size and although these are expensive at the moment, flash memory is following Moore’s law which indicates that the price should continue to drop at an exponential rate as the maximum capacity increases. What I really like about the Zen having an SD card slot is the fact that I already have SD cards from mobile phones and cameras, which I can re-use in the Zen.

The other huge selling point of the Zen is the 2.5inch screen – the same size screen as the iPod Classic but the Zen is a fraction of the size. Its size is comparable to a credit card and is a very slim 0.44-inch thick. Surprisingly though it actually feels very sturdy in the hand. The Zen also plays a wider variety of file types, so no need to convert your entire music collection or to use iTunes, you can even use Windows Media Player or Winamp to manage your music and video files. The Zen can also be used as a dictaphone as it has a built-in microphone and also has an FM Radio (a must for a PhantomFM fan like myself) – these are two features that you must purchase additional accessories for in order to have them on an iPod, accessories that cost over €50 each.

Overall the Zen represents, to me, a better investment than any other kind of mp3 player would, especially an iPod. I’m going to be a very happy music/video lover once I get my paws on one of these.

You can view other entries to today’s question over on Damien Mulley’s blog.

What was the favourite invention from your childhood?

This week is Science Week – which is hard not to notice if you’re a reader of any of the popular Irish Blogs. They’ve been running a blogging competition and my favourite entry so far has been by Roosta answering the “What invention do you want to see most in the future?” topic from today with his Giant Fighting Robots, it totally cracked me up. I’ve had visions of B-Movie type escapades on the moon ever since. Yesterday’s topic was “What was the favourite invention from your childhood?” and although the competition is closed for this topic I still feel an urge to write about it briefly.

HoTMaiL

Over 10 years ago my brother Dave brought home a dial-up modem for our home computer, opening up a mass of information and entertainment to us. Prior to this the only access that we had to any kind of Internet was from free CDs that came with computer magazines (they would sometimes put entire websites on these CDs!). Being teenagers and having little concern we proceeded to run up extraordinarily large home phone bills. Much to our dismay the Internet got banned from the house, but not before we both got completely hooked.

Luckily for us an Internet Café opened up nearby where we could get our fix. But the thing about the Internet way back then (which is actually exactly the same, now) is that you needed an e-mail address to sign-up to practically everything online. Not having your own internet service provider (ISP) at home meant no e-mail address and this closed off a large section of online content.

Independence Day 1996 - Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched the first webmail service on the Internet, they chose this day to symbolise freedom from ISP based e-mail and being able to access your e-mail from anywhere in the world. This service was called HoTMaiL and in December 1997, having reached over 8 million subscribers, it was bought by Microsoft and is now known as Windows Live Hotmail, though users still generally refer to it as simply Hotmail.

Thanks to Hotmail in the late 90’s a whole world of geeky goodness became privy to my curious mind. Having access to a web-based e-mail service meant that I could sign-up to all those wonderful geeky science fiction and technology newsletters and websites that I dreamed about being able to access and get involved with. It meant being able to make friends online in far off places like America that would happily spoil the latest season of Star Trek Voyager for you.

Most importantly though, it meant being able to share interesting websites, files and photos. It was a lot harder to find information (and any interesting content) online in the days before Google search and blogging. Also, not having access to an e-mail account meant being the last person online to find out about everything. Web based e-mail also meant you could access your e-mail from any computer, any time. Not knowing if your parents were ever going to let you get back online at home meant that you often had to use your initiative to access your e-mail, so being able to access your e-mail from any computer was very important.

Through my youth online I learned how to write, to think critically, and I was encrouaged by my peers to be opinionated and expressive. I was encouraged to learn new skills like web design, graphic design and typing skills. If it hadn’t been for my first e-mail address I probably wouldn’t have immersed myself so completely into the online world and to this day it is of benefit to me that I did.