MP3 Player - The In Thing. For Now.

I remember those days when Walkman was in, I was in elementary school. I had one. Used to listen to Backstreet Boys songs on it... Got a problem with that???

Then Discman came around some years later, when I was in high school. I had one too. Used it a lot less though cuz it was bulky and CDs are soooooo fragile to carry around.

When I was in college, MP3 player was the in-thing. By this time, too busy to get one but not too busy thinking about getting one.

I - FINALLY - bought an MP3 player two days back, after centuries of thinking of getting one. Using a portion of my this year's angpow collection. Haha, this time I am behind time. People are getting MP3/Video player and I am just with my first MP3 player.

The problem with the intense competition and advancement in technology these days is that we consumers are really spoiled for choice. For the past years, it's always been like "I want to buy but I don't know which model to get" dilemma.

Sony came to our campus this week. Which was a good thing cuz since I had no time to travel all the way down town purposely to hunt and buy an MP3 player, for them to come to me that's a brilliant marketing strategy. University students are always too busy to make time and too tired when we have time. Especially the ones with no life stuck everyday in the lab like us.

Presenting my new baby, Sony NW-E010 Series,

... The light blue one (extreme left). Without the sequins. Damn, I want one with sequins but they didn't sell it here.

If you set it to shuffle mode, you can choose the shuffling to be totally random, or your 100 favourites, or by the years.

When playing a song, you can click to see the song title and the title.

There are even sound equalizer presets to choose from, as you like - Live, Studio, Club, Arena, or if you don't like all these extra fancy stuff just switch it off.

One thing that sucks about it is that they can't read Chinese/Korean characters. So I had to romanize all my non-English songs one by one. Good thing I read Chinese pretty OK so I was done without much hassle. But still, it was a tedious process because half the songs I want in the player had non-English titles. Who likes to right-click and rename files after files lah?

Hmmm. My next technology-item purchase target would probably be handphone. Mine is seriously injured here and there with it slipping out of my butter fingers every now and then, although it surprisingly still functions fine. It just feels like it's time for a change. You get what I mean? No? Doesn't matter.

Now here's another dilemma caused by the intense competition and advancement in technology... should I stick to Nokia? Or switch to Sony Ericsson or Samsung? And what phone series to get? Choices. When you want them, they're not an option. When you don't want them, they're all over the place. Any advice?