Today, John talks about his mp3 player

This is my mp3 player, and I like it quite a bit. It's a Gigabeat F60 (60 gig) built way back in 2005, though I purchased it new just a year or two ago.

The controls consist of five buttons on the right side (power/home, menu, volume up/down, and a multifunctional "A" button), which you can't see in the picture, and the pressure-activated plustouch on the front. Apparently, some reviewers didn't like the plustouch, and of course it's an obvious effort to somehow counter the iPod's clickwheel, but from what I've used of iPods, I honestly like this a bit more. It offers two more methods of input than the clickwheel, for one thing: both can be pressed up, down, left, right, and in the middle, but while the clickwheel can only turn clockwise and counterclockwise, you can slide your finger across the plustouch right-to-left, left-to-right, down-to-up, and up-to-down. And then there's still the side buttons on top of that, so I find navigating the device to be a much easier process than on the iPod, when you get used to it.

And it's very fortunate that the controls are so good, because the rest of the interface is pretty iffy. The screen is bogged down with oversized, gaudy bits of graphical paraphernalia, all playlists have to be uploaded to the player from a computer, the delete function is buggy, the custom EQ is 2-band, and the system is generally slow.

These things can be a pain to deal with sometimes, but usually it's not that bad: I rarely use custom playlists when I listen to music, there are enough decent EQ presets to keep me from being frustrated often, and the slowness can be expected from a system this old. Still, it's enough that I'm heavily considering putting Rockbox on there. If I do, though, and don't like it, I don't know if Toshiba still has the original firmware available for me to put on again. I'll have to look into it.

The absolute worst part about this system, though, is the software. It's a slow, heavy, buggy, inflexible piece of crap called Gigabeat Room, and it's the only thing you can use to transfer files to the player aside from WMP, which I haven't gotten to work period. I also can't get it onto my laptop, so whenever I want to download music to it, I have to pull the music off my laptop and put it on my desktop, which only has USB 1.0. Hopefully, Rockbox will allow me to download from the laptop.

I realize I've made the player sound kinda abominable, but I really do like it a lot, especially for what I paid for it ($75 compared to about $400 retail).