I was wondering because I look at the costs of a dedicated MP3 player and it's sometimes 1/2 to the full cost of a Pocket PC....which does so much more. I don't have a big budget to buy both, so I was hoping for some thoughts!
I use my Ipaq 2200 and 3100 regularly as an MP3 player. The 3100 is set up with a PC Card sleeve and a 5 GB Toshiba PC Card drive. Five gigs is a lot of music which can be swapped out for another card easily. My 2200 has a 1 GB microdrive loaded with music. The convenience part of this is the ease of loading new music via my notebook computer pc card slots.
For the software player, I use Iradio/Iplay for its ease of use, sound quality, and low battery consumption. I get over 8 hours with the 2200 and over 12 hours with the 3100.
The 2200 has an excellent sound system that Iradio takes every advantage of. Iradio produces sound that rivals my CW200 and IHP-120. It has a five band equalizer with adjustable band frequencies. The EQ works with little or no distortion unlike most other MP3 players on the PPC including GSPlayer2. What I like about playing music on my PPC is the touch screen. It is so easy to look at my songs and pick one. I can delete music I don't like and build my own playlists. With Iradio, I can disable the screen and the buttons if necessary. Bumping is not an issue.
I only wish there was a remote option.
One additional plus is a built-in speaker. For audio books, the speaker is quite acceptable.
BTW, with the 2200 extended battery option (3600 mah), the 2200 could play for over 24 hours before recharging. Add the upcoming 4 GB Hitachi microdrive and you have a music, ebook, audible book PDA monster.
I am a VERy surprised dude...chucked in a SD card into my Palm Tungsten E, loaded a couple of 128 mp3's and then decided to hook up my HD-580's rather than my Sony clip ons...just to see how much it would suck...
I nearly swooned after the first few seconds of 50 cents in da club!!! It ROCKED!!! The 580's were buzzing with bass and everything...awesome sound quality for a PDA based mp3 player!!!
I am still looking at it and shaking my head in disbelief...this beats my PCDP for sound quality by a MILE!!! and plays mp3's to boot!!
hap happy happiest!!
There is noticeable difference when you listen to the 580's out of the headphone port on the PDA and when you connect the PDA-AMP-HD580 but its not THAT much of a difference... (at equal volumes) if you have a lower impedence headphone like the HD-590 or one of them Grados then you could be in for a treat!!
Go and demo the Tungsten E or one of the newer palms and see if my experience is repeatable and conclusive...anyone have a Best Buy nearby??
Someone should try with a AKG 1000 or whatever that monster is called
Originally posted by Jasper994 hell no! first off every time you bump the screen it stops playing! GRRRR!
In WMP for the PocketPC, you can assign hot-buttons to turn the screen off when you're playing. It helps to conserve the battery as well as prevent the screen tapping setting off accidental controls.
Most of the other audio playback software I've seen on the PocketPC does the same thing.
Although, I'm still happier with the iPod as my portable player.
I think it really depends on the unit. I've got the T-Mobile Pocket PC Edition phone, which is pretty much just a Pocket PC device with some phone functionality thrown in, and the sound is horrible, even with an amp.
I use mine every once in a while with my rs-1. I own a h2215 and a620bt. The h2215 while playing a 1411kb mp3 with pocket mvp sounds very good ( h2215 also has some extra sound opition software build in). Only thing is it really eats up your memory fast , so i bought a 1.5gb Cf card and 512mb SD. I perfer a cd player but the h2215 is smaller then most mp3 players and suits me well when I don't care a ton about how good it sounds ( working out).
While searching for a portable player--either a pcdp or hd-based player--I've been using my Shure E5s and a Palm Tungsten T3 with ogg files encoded at 320 VBR. I don't have the exposure to enough portables to really be able to judge, but the sound is much better than I'd expected. Enough so that I sometimes instead consider buying a mondo SD card and just using my T3 for a convenient portable. A shiny pcdp with a good line out might be a better choice for portable desktop listening; been searching this forum for several days.
The hp out of the T3 provides good sound and no distortion at low to medium volume levels; more than easily drives the E5s. Adding the Headsave Tempo to the mix increases the sound stage, tightens the bass, and provides good, clean (no noise at all) across-spectrum sound at volume levels higher than I would ever listen to.
The benefit is that I can listen to tunes and create MS Office-based documents, check email, surf the Web, and all the other stuff for which I use the PDA. I recently created a PowerPoint presentation while listening to Enigma. Cool…
Be interesting to attend a mini-meet in order to have better-trained ears check it out.
The author of the Iplay MP3 player has tested a number of PocketPCs and has written that the Ipaqs are among the best PPCs in terms of the potential sound quality with the top of the line being the best. He has commented that much of the MP3 software for the PPC leaves a lot to be desired in terms of a pure clean sound especially the free Windows Media Player.
The Ipaq 2200 is especially convenient as a music player since it has two slots (SD slot and type II CF slot). That allows you to install your normal PDA stuff on the SD card (for me about 200 mb worth of stuff) and your music on the CF card. Then you can swap the music card without affecting your normal PDA functions.
I find my PPC indispensable. I use to carry a ultra small notebook PC around, but not now.
Originally posted by drp The hp out of the T3 provides good sound and no distortion at low to medium volume levels; more than easily drives the E5s. Adding the Headsave Tempo to the mix increases the sound stage, tightens the bass, and provides good, clean (no noise at all) across-spectrum sound at volume levels higher than I would ever listen to.
The benefit is that I can listen to tunes and create MS Office-based documents, check email, surf the Web, and all the other stuff for which I use the PDA. I recently created a PowerPoint presentation while listening to Enigma. Cool…
Be interesting to attend a mini-meet in order to have better-trained ears check it out.
I bought my T3 primarily as a replacement for a RocketBook ebook reader. Owing to it's superb 320 X 480 screen, it serves this purpose very well. But I never considered using the HP output for music until reading this thread. I just tried it with ER4s and I have to agree that it sounds good. Since I'm an iPod fan I'll likely never use it for music, but it's nice to know I could.
Any idea where one might be able to find the specs on the amps in these units?
I bought an ipaq H4155 a few weeks back and just barely got around to getting an SD card this week. I threw a few LAME aps mp3s on there and was quite suprised at how good it sounded-- and that's only with WMP9.
I thought about hooking this thing up to my Sharp SD-NX10 for an alarm clock (
) etc. and was wondering, does software exist to allow me to stream MP3s over a network? I have wi-fi on this thing and it's easy enough to copy files from a network drive to my SD card, but I can't stream off the network drive with the software that it comes with... any such software exist?
I got an iPAQ 1940 a month ago, and experimented with Clie TG50 as well. iPAQ has really excellent sound quality. Clie on the other hand has audible background noise! So from sound quality standapoint, not to mention functionality - we're talking about a pretty powerful handheld units nowdays, having an equivalent of winamp shouldn't be an issue - there's no reason why iPAQs at least can't be used as audio players. However, battery life of these units is usually miserable, and playing music makes it even worse. 3 hours of play time doesn't cut it, and if you plan on using a CF hard drive it's going to be even less. That's the curse of today's handhelds, they can a lot of things that a full computer can - full web browsing, full email, icq, messenger, sms, playstation emulator, vpn, vnc, telnet, access to network shares, ms word/excel, encryption, video playback, audio playback, voice recognition blah blah, but faced with incredibly short battery lives - they might not even last a working day - you suddenly realise how it's far less useful than it looks (I'm even tempted to say gimmick but they still can be gainfully used).
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