Greg's Weight Loss Blog

First of all, I am a gadget freak. I love to have the latest electronic gizmos and the coolest gadgets. But I have never ever owned a portable mp3 player. I just never thought I would use one. I mean I did have satellite radio in my car and I have ripped all my CDs into mp3s at one point or another and I occasionally listen to music at home but most of my music listening has been in my car. I am actually pretty proud that I have been resisting the purchase of an iPhone or an Android phone for the longest time now as I really don’t feel I need one. Sure it’d be nice to be able to browse the net from wherever at will but I can’t justify the $30 monthly charge to do such thing.

Now that I spend a lot of time alone outside of my car, mostly running, on the elliptical machine and at the gym, I thought it would be nice to be able to keep myself entertained with some tunes. So I decided it was time to buy an mp3 player. When I decided that there is an actual need that has to be fulfilled by one of the latest gadgets I research them. I knew I wanted something small and portable. I didn’t care about touch screens, big LCD screens, all I wanted was something small that I can stick in my pocket or snap on my arm and go for a run.

I have never been a fan of Apple and their marketing department. I’m a PC guy. I’d get an Android phone before I’d get an iPhone, mostly because my carrier is T-mobile and I’m certainly not switching to AT&T. But I must say that their iPod truly has a great user interface and it is very well designed. That user interface is by far the nicest and most useful I have seen. But I swore I would never be found toting an iPod with the white earbud like a drone who succumbed to the marketing hype. Plus their Nano is too big for running, has too many features that I don’t need and I will not install iTunes on my Windows 7 machine unless someone is beating me with a stick. The shuffle looked like a super unit though. It is as small as mp3 players get. But it still has the mandatory iTunes requirement to put music on it and it needs a headphone adapter if I ever wanted anything but the $5 junky earpiece. So I opted against it.

Luckily Sandisk came to the rescue and I purchased a SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 8 GB MP3 Player. This unit is truly amazing. It’s tiny and packs a great feature set. And best of all it’s not an iPod. I have loaded a ton of music onto it already and we’ll see how I’ll like running with the music in my ear as soon as I’m back on my feet running. It is audio book and podcast compatible as well as has an FM tuner in it. Since I’m not too big on finding my own music I might try one of their new slotRadio cards. They’re supposed to have 1,000 songs on them from a given genre and play like a commercial free radio channel. This just might be the thing I need.