AMAX NAPA MP3 Player

Review

by Kingpin. Dec 6/2000

OK... What is the one thing that you wish for when it comes to MP3's? That Napster would live forever? Well I can't do anything about that one. How about a portable MP3 player that comes with more than 64 Megs of ram? Well your wishing is over!

Finally someone has done what we all have been thinking! The NAPA MP3 player from Amax takes the best of portable MP3 players like the RIO and the ease of CD's and combined them in one slick little unit! This player has it all over the chip and hard drives based players. Imagine that you could burn a CD full of MP3's and place them in a player and listen to them without having to convert them back to standard audio. Well now you can! While component units have been coming out on the market I have never seen a portable unit for this price. While the RIO is about $300.00 CDN for a 64 Meg player and the Jukebox from CREATIVE is about $700.00 CDN for a 6.4 gig player, the NAPA is only $299.99 but has the befits of both the other players.

While with the RIO you can load up the 64 Megs in a few minutes you only get about 1 hour of music. The Jukebox on the other hand gives you a lot more in terms of play time but you have to load the songs over USB. This can take about and hour a gig. The NAPA comes to the rescue.... With this player you can just burn your songs to CD. That's right... in their original MP3 format! you then can just change the CD ALA any other portable CD player.

You might think that this has to come at a price... We hate to disappoint you but you get all the features you would on a portable CD player and then some. The unit weighs in at just over a kg including the battery. Speaking of battery you might be thinking that this must use 4 AA's and chew through them faster than I go through Pizza on a LAN night! Wrong! The 3.6V lithium battery that IS INCLUDED gives about 6-8+ hours of play time! How dose it do that on only 3.6V? Well it seems that the player has some built in ram. It spins up... loads the song and then plays it from the ram only to spin up when the cache is getting low. This has another benefit. It is incredibly hard to make this thing skip! AND TRUST ME I TRIED! I hit it... I dropped it... I stood in the middle of the room and shook it and I have yet to have it skip!

Other features include...