Entertainment Gadgets

Entertainment gadgets are typically electronic devices designed to provide the user with music, video, games or even all three.

Digital Audio Players

Digital Audio Players (DAPs), sometimes referred to as MP3 players, have a primary function of storing, organizing and playing audio files. Hard drive-based players read digital audio files from a hard disk drive (HDD), and have higher capacities currently ranging up to 320 GB, meaning that tens of thousands of songs can be stored on one player. Flash-based players are non-mechanical solid state devices that hold digital audio files on internal flash memory or removable flash media (memory cards), with storage up to 32 GB. As they do not have moving parts, they require less battery power than hard-drive players, and may be more resilient to hazards such as dropping or fragmentation.

Some popular makes and models of DAPs include:

• Apple (Mini, Nano, Shuffle)
• Cowon (iAudio range)
• Creative Zen (e.g. Stone)
• iRiver (e.g. p10, clix3, P7, T6)

Portable Multimedia Players

Portable multimedia players (PMPs) are capable of storing and displaying images, as well as playing audio and video. Like DAPs, the data is typically stored on a hard drive or flash memory. A colour LCD or OLED screen is typically used as a display, with sizes ranging from 1.8 inches to 7 inches. A standard PMP uses a 5-way D-pad to navigate, wheel and touch mechanisms are seen on players from the iPod and Sansa series. Additional buttons are commonly seen for features such as volume control. File formats used typically include the MP3 audio format, Windows Media Audio (WMA), Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), WAV, Ogg Vorbis, Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), JPEG GIF, PNG, TIFF, MPEG-4 video format, Windows Media Video (WMV), AVI, Recently, more and more players are enabling compatibility to the DivX video format and its open-source parallel, Xvid.

Some of the most popular PMPs are listed in the table below.