Martin McKeown
Hardware!
Throughout the years technology has changed rapidly, with many things such as MP3 players, web cams and wireless keyboards coming out of no-where to dominate a lot of the IT industry nowadays. Mp3 players and Apple I-pods nowadays consist of three main companies, and (apple). These three companies distribute and produce millions of Mp3 players and I-pods, the Apple I-pod section is said to be worth in and around $10 billion. Creative are also mass producers of other pieces of hardware, including Web cams, keyboards and Memory cards. Netac was formed in China in the mid 80’s and has been a major manufacturer and distributor Mp 3 players all over the world. With MP3 players seen in possession of nearly every young and old person nowadays, they are an amazing part of technology, a small gadget measuring around 11cm is able to store hours upon hours of music! They work with using flash memory ranging from 128mb around 4hours of music) to 4 GB (around 1000 songs). They have revolutionary changed the way people travel to places as they do not have to sit in silence and they have the opportunity to listen to the music that they desire via their MP 3 player or I-pod. Furthermore these little gadgets can be easily purchased at any decent electrical store.
When they were first released, MP3 players were very expensive with many people not able to afford them. But know with the mass production of them all over the globe they have became extremely popular everywhere, because of their easy use.
To put the music onto the actual MP3 player it can be done in two simple ways, the first method is to put music that is saved onto your PC into the device via the flash memory, to do this you plug the MP3 player to the USB socket were the device is then able to retrieve the data. In addition to this, with newer MP3 players you can simply plug them into your stereo system and transmit the data from the CD’s or Tapes onto the device, by simply pressing the record button on the stereo. MP 3 players are rapidly replacing the old Walkman tape players and CD walkmans, which are both outdated already by the new MP 3 players and I-pods. With a standard 128 MB device averagely costing you around £20 - £30and the dearest being around £200 (4 GB), it is obvious that the price is based on the amount of memory that one of these possesses, because of I-pods excellent distribution and advertisement departments in the company they will continue to sell many more of their products. In comparison to I-pods in my opinion I think Mp3 players are much better value and they are guaranteed to work much better, as the I-pod runs on a rechargeable Lithium battery, with the MP 3 players running on a standard AAA replaceable batteries. I also found there to be thousands of complaints lodged against Apple (makers of I-pods) for many of their products just simply not working after around one year of usage. This is mainly due to the lithium battery, which usually runs out of life in the same way as a mobile phone would.
