Digital Trends

Everyone wants one. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, colors and cases. Most let you listen to music, some allow you to watch video and a few are even wireless. They're one of the most popular consumer electronics products out there and a computer company named Apple is the current industry leader. We are of course referring to the mighty digital audio or MP3 player.

Since their introduction in the late ‘90s, digital audio players have become one of the run away successes of portable electronics. 2003 sales figures, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, were a staggering $556 million, which was a 171 percent increase over the previous year. More importantly, the CEA projects this revenue will grow by another 27 percent this year.

While you'll hear the term "MP3 player" more often, these devices play more than just the MP3 format, so we'll continue to refer to them as "digital audio players." In its most basic form a digital audio player is a portable device which allows you to store and play potentially thousands of your favorite tunes and transfer them to and from your computer. These devices come primarily in two flavors: hard drive-based models, which allow you to carry large amounts of music but tend to be bulkier, and flash-memory units, which are smaller and sleeker but hold fewer songs.

There is also a third style, MP3 CD players, which are capable of reading CDs burned with digital audio files on them. As much as this design keeps hanging on, it's hard to argue if these are true MP3 players since we have defined them as having internal memory storage, so we won't be evaluating these types of products during this article.

In addition to CD players and internal memory storage devices, other form factors exist which are considered hybrids. With the growing popularity of music on the go, coupled with the new trend of convergence, other consumer electronics products that also happen to incorporate digital audio playback are starting to sprout up.

Historically, the most common among these other devices have been personal digital assistants such as Pocket PCs and Palm Pilots. These devices have been playing media files for years. Additionally, cell phones are now sporting MP3 playback and ring tones, portable hard drives loaded with music can be carried from your computer to your car and digital audio servers can wirelessly stream your favorite tunes to anywhere in the home.