Product Reviews

The biggest problem with MP3 players is storage. Although most players on the market come with some kind of removable media slot, the price of these cards - over £100 for 64Mb - means you have to rely on having a single card and uploading music to it from your Mac. Unfortunately, that means you're severely limited if you want a choice of music when travelling around.

Iomega believes it has the solution to this problem with the HipZip portable music player. The HipZip uses the 40Mb Clik disk - now renamed Pocket Zip - as storage, which means you can afford to carry several of the £10 disks around with you. Thanks to their size (about 25mm across and 2mm thick), you won't be loaded down even with a dozen of them in your bag.

However, the player itself is quite large and bulky compared to the current generation of MP3 players, being about half as big again as an average MiniDisc player. Given that you can get a Pocket Zip drive in PC Card format, this might be surprising. But the HipZip is more than just a player, it also has a USB port and built-in Lithium-ion battery which seriously bulks it up.

The payback for this bulk is that this is also a fully functional Pocket Zip drive, in fact, the first such standalone drive to be made available for the Mac. Install the Iomega drivers, plug the drive into a USB port, and disks inserted into the HipZip mount on your desktop, just like any other removable drive. This makes copying music to the drive incredibly simple - just drag any MP3 or Windows Media Audio (WMA) file on to the disk, and it'll be recognised by the HipZip.

You can also use the full copy of Musicmatch Jukebox supplied with the HipZip to copy files to the drive, which has the advantage of preserving your playlist order, although it's a little slower than copying directly to a disk. The full version differs from the free download by being significantly

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faster at copying CD audio to MP3, and Iomega is to be commended for including it. The interface for this software might not be to everyone's taste, but it does at least do the job of creating, playing and cataloguing music well.

The Labtec in-ear headphones supplied, like most of their type, lack bass, so if you want to experience the best from your HipZip you'll need to budget for a better pair, but this is true of the majority of personal audio devices. Once a decent pair of headphones is used, the audio quality of the HipZip is good, although it's let down slightly by the equalisation options. Despite having preset equalisation options such as Rock and Jazz, the player only allows users to increase or decrease bass and treble, which is disappointing as many cheaper MP3 players have five-band equalisation.

In use, it's certainly refreshing to be able to carry around enough music to fill a long journey. The player was also much more tolerant of corrupt or badly encoded MP3s than many we've come across, playing a file with known errors and only skipping over the affected part. The bulk of the player means you can't realistically carry it in a trouser or shirt pocket, but a coat pocket is fine. However, for short journeys the removable media becomes much less compelling. 40Mb means you can't fit an hour's music on a single disk, so you have to carry around two disks if you want an hour's worth of music. Obviously, this is much better than anything with 32Mb of memory built in, but for shorter use an MP3 player with 64Mb built in may be a better option.

But the real problem with the HipZip is its price. At over £280, it costs nearly £100 more than you'll pay for a Rio 600, one of the nicest small players around, and also more expensive than many portable MiniDisc recorders.

The HipZip is something of a mixed bag. The fact that the media's so cheap compared with SmartMedia or Compact Flash means you can afford to carry a large amount of music with you, which is great on long journeys. But 40Mb isn't enough to contain an average album at good quality, and compared with most MP3 players the HipZip is wildly overpriced.

If you regularly travel away for long periods, the HipZip is a good way of taking quite a lot of music with you. But, unless you're absolutely wedded to having your music in purely digital form and like the speed and convenience of encoding and playing MP3, you would be wise to look at MiniDisc players as well as the HipZip.