Gadgets Blog » Portable Media Players

Few companies boast the sheer brand recognition held by Apple. The electronics industry has turned Steve Jobs and friends into media darlings, with ridiculous amounts of speculation and anticipation pertaining to every gadget the company produces. While the iPod may be the industry standard for MP3 players, it’s by no means the only unit on the market worth exploring. If you’re unable to throw down for the Apple brand name, you’re in luck: a wide assortment of gadgets are perfectly capable of storing your tunes.

Take, for example, our Gadget of the Week, the Sony X Series Walkman MP3 player. In a different day and age, the name Walkman was synonymous with portable music, and Sony has wisely kept the name attached to a series of functional and sleek MP3 players. Averaging $100 less than their Apple counterparts, the X series comes packaged with premium noise-canceling headphones and a gift card redeemable for 100 free downloads via Sony music.

The beauty of a the X Series comes in device flexibility. Instead of putting up with the oft-frustrating iTunes platform for syncing and loading music, the X Series can function like an external hard drive, enabling you to drag and drop songs off of your computer and onto the player. This is great for syncing on the go and for keeping your player’s song collection up to date with your computer. The X Series comes with some great touchscreen technology, with an interface that is responsive and functional. If the touchscreen isn’t your thing, Sony wisely included additional functionality in a series of buttons along the bottom edge of the screen. This is especially useful when switching between audio and video playback.