Compaq iPAQ Personal Mini-CD Player PM-1
My fellow gadget-head officemate Robert showed up this morning (mid-December 2001) with a new toy: a portable Sony CD/MP3 player. This set off the usual string of thoughts in my head: me want toy too; must find “Christmas gifts” for “friends” and “family” after first “testing” them myself; must shop online now.
A few links later and I came across the Compaq iPAQ Personal Mini-CD Player
PM-1. This is a
portable CD/MP3 player that uses those cute little 80mm CD-R discs that music
companies tried to use for CD singles in the late 80s and early 90s. Each
mini-CD holds 185MB of data, which is about three hours of MP3 or six hours of
Windows Media
Audio (WMA) music.
The discs are about as big as the top of a coffee cup, and the player itself
is slightly larger than a wallet. | 
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The first notable thing about the PM-1 is that its blister packaging must have been designed to survive a close-range bomb blast, rather than to be opened easily by the purchaser. Conventional tools won’t cut it. I first tried a ballpoint pen to split the seam, then a small knife to cut through the plastic, and then a Swiss Army knife’s scissors. I didn’t even leave a mark on the packaging. I’m not kidding – didn’t Compaq run this packaging by any focus groups? If they had, I’m sure the comments would have been just like mine: “Gee, it looks like a fantastic product. Unfortunately I can’t open it.” Finally I borrowed some large sewing scissors and carefully cut around the seam. I was able to get just enough of the plastic opened to pull out the player and all the accessories.
Any-who, if you get the package open and don’t slice yourself up in the process, the player comes with a pair of AAA rechargeable Ni-MH batteries, a wall-wart-style AC adapter, three blank mini-CD-Rs, an installation CD, a remote control, a pair of headphones, and some documentation. The remote is very cool: it plugs into the player’s headphone jack, and then in turn it has a headphone jack. That means you can use the remote if you like but you don’t have to. The remote has a nice, though smallish, LCD display, and there’s a clip on the back of it. The idea must have been to stick the player in your backpack and clip the remote onto your coat. It makes sense.
I’ve had the player for only a couple of hours now. So far it works great. It feels solid and well-engineered, except for a “VOID WARRANTY IF REMOVED” sticker on the back that will definitely get scraped off soon if I carry it around in my backpack. I wish, as I do with all handheld devices, that it had a cradle instead of a plug for recharging, but if you leave the plug on your desk and don’t let it fall on the floor, it’ll still be convenient enough. I have shaken the player as hard as I can and can’t get it to skip. Sound quality is fine. With the headphones off in a quiet office, I can’t hear the disc spinning; in fact, it’s hard to tell through the window on the player’s door that a generic unlabeled disc is even moving. The LCD display could use backlighting.
One spooky experience you’ll have with the player is listening to a song, looking down at the player, and noticing that the CD isn’t spinning! The Compaq advertises an 8-minute buffer (probably a 4-minute buffer with 128K MP3s), so if it reads ahead all the way to the end of the current song, it does the smart thing to save batteries and spins down the CD. Pretty neat.
I haven’t tried the installation CD yet. According to the packaging, there’s a copy of MusicMatch and Windows Media Player. Since I’ve already grown an MP3 collection, I probably won’t try out the bundled software. I’ve heard WMA format is pretty good, though, especially considering that the files are half the size of same-length 128Kbps MP3s.
Something else I’m trying now is called the MP3 Stream Recorder, which if you know Shoutcast does exactly what you think: downloads the content of streaming MP3 servers to your hard drive. Right now I have a couple of instances of this application each grabbing three hours’ worth of one of my favorite Shoutcast stations (Groove Salad and Bassdrive). Burn them to mini-CD and I have mobile Shoutcast. In fact, in a year or two when I’m able to receive Shoutcast wirelessly through Bluetooth while taking CalTrain or BART to work, then humankind will have officially invented what I’ll call radio.
I have one complaint about the product. In the “Getting Started” guide we are warned “Do not charge the batteries for more than 8 hours to avoid reducing battery life.” Great. Compaq couldn’t spend a little more engineering time to make the built-in charger intelligent enough to switch to trickle-charge once the batteries had reached capacity? That’s very annoying – one more thing to worry about that technology should have been able to take care of on its own.
Cost is about $99. I got mine at Circuit City through Amazon.com. That’s right – you order and pay through Amazon and then pick up the merchandise right away at your local Circuit City. I expected to save a little time through this method. I didn’t. That experience merits a separate review of its own.
Update
March 6, 2002, after owning this device for about three months: Other problems are that it doesn’t support UDF (which I believe is the usual format that Windows XP uses to burn CDs), and it doesn’t have any concept of playlists, so you have to either live with shuffle play or carefully arrange the names of tracks to be in alphabetical order (01songA.mp3, 02songB.mp3, etc.). But other than these problems, the product works as advertised.