Rocky,
"What a joke. That Nomad Jukbox can only get
about 2-3 hours on a set of 4 AA batteries.
Word of mouth is going to kill this off."
Now that I think about it 6000 minutes of recording space for only 120 to 180 minutes of playing time seems ridiculous. The flash based players get upto 10 hours of play time on two AA batteries.
From the Mercury Center review posted earlier this week...
Nomad Jukebox
For one thing, it's hard to organize 2,000 songs on a one-by-two inch LCD screen. It shows five album titles or artist names at a time, so it can take some time to scroll to those ZZ Top tracks at the end of the list. Navigating around isn't easy either, since both the library of stored music and the playlist are accessed by the same button.
A 17-year-old who tried out the Jukebox for us -- and is accustomed to the colorful MP3 player programs typical on home computers these days -- was disappointed by the monochrome display and data-entry limitations -- but stuck the device in his baggy pants pocket, put on the headphones, and carried it everywhere.
Ideally, the Jukebox would have a little keyboard, where the user could tap in the name of the song to be played. No doubt we will see such devices in the future.
We also had some problems playing a few MP3s downloaded from the Internet. They will play fine on a software PC player, but may be impossible to load into the MP3 player or skip while playing. This problem has occurred with other MP3 players as well, and is not unique to the Jukebox.
Another problem noticeable with smaller MP3 players is magnified by the Jukebox's storage capacity.
CDs are recorded at different volume levels, and mixing songs from different CDs on the playlist can send the listener diving for the volume control all too often. Some programs for reading CDs include a feature that evens out sound levels, but the Jukebox's program does not.
Creative promises 4 hours of battery life with the included rechargeables. In our tests, they lasted little more than 3 hours, a pretty normal relationship between claim and reality.
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