I’ve just become the proud owner of a 256MB IOPS music player from ISM Technology, as mentioned on Slashdot a couple of months ago, and now available in most of Europe from Pixmania.
This particular model has several appealing features:
- Ogg Vorbis playback (I just finished ripping my CD collection to Ogg)
- FM Radio with auto-tuner
- Record from radio or built-in mic
- USB Mass Storage interface – so works well with Linux
- Small and cute (weight < 50g)
As far as I’m aware, this is the first Flash-based (and therefore reasonably-priced) Ogg player with non-beta firmware available in the European market. (The iRiver players were available earlier, but I heard bad things about firmware stability from the xiph.org VorbisHardware wiki page, which has now been down for months.)
I only had two problems. The first was that Pixmania wanted me to fax them my passport(!), driving licence(!) or a utility bill to prove I lived where I lived. I faxed them an electricity bill, although I’m not sure what it proves. If I was a fraudster, faking one up would be the work of a few minutes.
The second was that the documentation is all in French :-( Still, my schoolboy French, the online version and Babelfish combined to come to my rescue, and I’ve now figured out how to work the thing. The only nit I’ve found so far is that it doesn’t seem to support reading embedded Ogg tags.
“doesn’t seem to support reading embedded Ogg tags”
Does this mean it doesn’t display the song’s name in the display? That would seem to be a huge disadvantage.
It displays the filename (which in my case is the same as the name of the song, with the track number prepended and .ogg appended.) So it’s not too bad.