New toy (finally)

Four weeks and one day after winning the auction, the Rio Chiba arrives at my door. Naturally, I already gave up waiting and bought a Virgin Pulse 256MB player on clearance at Target for a (super cheap) $35.

A few interesting notes now that I've used more than one of these things:

• Both players can be accessed (in XP at least) without installing any extra software. Actually, the Virgin Pulse model required a firmware update first, but that's close enough.


• Both players have practically the same interface and "software." I imagine that the Virgin Pulse people licensed the hardware from Rio


• The Virgin Pulse model supports reading MP3's off the unit, as well as subdirectories. The Rio doesn't support either.


• Both models have 256mb of memory on-board, which translates to about 3.5 hours of music. I added another gig to the Rio, which should give me about 17 hours of music. More than enough for the whole day for my long days.