MP3 PLAYERS  

    Top Three MP3 Players

Flash Memory: They are solid-state devices with no moving parts therefore no skipping Hence it's popularity with the fitness buffs. They are much smaller and lighter of the two types. Roughly the size of a lipstick, weighting  from about 1.5 to 4 ounces.

Most  players have 128 megabytes (MB) and up of internal memory; 128 MB can hold about two hours of MP3-formatted music recorded at a CD-quality setting. You can fit more music into memory if you compress songs into smaller files, but that may result in lower audio quality. Some flash-memory players also have expansion slots to add more memory via card slots.
 

Hard-Drive Players:  The hard drive group can be divided into two groups: large capacity(20 GB or higher) or microdrive (1.5-5GB). In the large capacity group the most popular being the 20 Gigabytes(GB)  can hold about 10,000 songs, is the size of a deck of cards and weighs less than a half a pound. Storage capacity can reach 80 gigabytes (GB), enough for more than 1,000 hours of music. But often that extra capacity translates into a bulkier, heavier player weighing up to 1 pound. The microdrive players, which tend to be palm-sized and weigh about a quarter-pound but can hold up to 2500 songs. The downfall of hard-drive players is the drive is always moving while playing therefore having the potential of skipping during exercise even with skip protection.

This MP3 Player review only covers large capacity hard-drive players. All the players picked as top three are 20 GB players. The next review to be posted will be the microdrive players followed up by flash-memory players. So keep coming back and checking for those new reviews.

Reviews used: CNet.com, PC World, PC Magazine, Consumer Reports and Wired. Each review compared at least 5 different players. When all reviews are complied we take the top three then go over to amazon.com to check what the most poplar reviews have to say. We accept amazon.com as long as the products we are looking at all have over 100 reviews each.
 

The Top Three MP3 Player 20GB or greater are #1 Apple iPod, #2 Rio Karma, #3 iRiver H120