Evolution of the MP3 Player
Portable digital music players have evolved through the years, from hulking $800 devices to tiny $60 iPod Shuffles. Here's a look at how MP3 players have changed over the past decade.
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1 of 17 pages
Evolution of the MP3 Player
(Image courtesy of PC World)Evolution of the MP3 Player
Though it seems as if the iPod has been around forever, the device is actually only eight years old as of October. Portable digital music players in general aren't much older, as the first clunky, hard-to-use and expensive ones showed up in 1998. It's easy to forget that, prior to today's video-enabled iPod Nano and sleek Zune HD, state-of-the-art MP3 players were bulky and pricey devices with short battery lives, frustrating copy-protection schemes and bad user interfaces.
In this slide show we'll look back at some of the landmark devices and features in the evolution of the portable MP3 player over the past decade.
-- Daniel Ionescu, PC World
