Having finally decided what mp3 player I wanted (an iRiver iHP-140) I set about finding one. In general you can’t find the range in New Zealand that you can in the US because the market is a lot smaller. This also means that I am used to a week or more delay when I have ordered stuff from overseas. This time I decided to go for a “local” merchant. In the end this meant flashcards.co.nz, an online store whose speciality I’ll let you guess. They were the only place I could find that actually had one in stock. So just after 4pm on a Friday I place my order. This timing meant that I expected the order to be processes on Monday for a Tuesday or Wednesday delivery. Instead I was awoken at 7am on Saturday by a courier with the device. Less than fifteen hours is very, very, impressive for an online purchase.
The player itself is also very nice. It supports ogg-vorbis, which is good because I already have a lot of stuff ripped in that format. It works well as a USB mass-storage device, even with my laptop which hates USB 2.0 devices. It comes with an excessively large range of cables (not only can it support an external microphone for recording, they actually supply one). On top of this the firmware upgrades are OS independent (I used OS X in this case) since all you need to do is upload the file onto the device and the rest is done through the player. It doesn’t have the social status of an ipod, but is one of these geeky feature-ridden devices that we all love. It is just as expensive as an ipod though, albeit with more features.