What to look for in an MP3 player...
1.Storage Capacity.
How much storage capacity you need will depend on what you want an MP3 player for, do you want a jukebox on which to store your entire music collection, or just a device for listening to music on the way to and from work or college? Your average CD album will take up around 30-40 MB (megabytes) of space at a decent compression quality, so if you want a player that can hold enough songs to get you to work and back without repeating you'll be looking at a player of around 128mb in size, you'll get around three or four CD's worth of music on there at a good quality of compression.
If, on the other hand you want to put all 300 CD's worth of music onto your player at say 196 kbps you are going to need a much higher storage capacity. Apple's 20GB (gigabyte) Ipod for example is said to be able to hold 5000 tunes at 128 kbps. Of course you can go higher and higher depending on how much music you have, or how much you suspect you may want to put on over the coming years.
So you need to weigh up what you are going to use your player for, will you take it on holiday and if so how much music will you listen to, how much variation will you want. Do you want to download tunes from the web and keep them all stored on a portable player or can you leave them on your PC and swap and change what you have on your player as and when you want. One obvious point is that, in general the more storage capacity you need the more expensive the unit will be.
A final important point to remember is that some mp3 players have expandable memory, particularly if they are integrated with a camera, or other media device such as a mobile phone - importantly these players are often advertised with a potential storage, say 2GB but they actually only come with 128MB and buying the extra capacity can cost you more than the unit itself! If you are considering a mobile phone to use as an mp3 player then having a flexible memory option is definitely an important consideration.
Expandable storage can be a benefit as you can keep selections of music on storage cards or similar and swap them round when you want a change or additional capacity, but dont forget that expandable storage will cost you extra as and when you buy it.
