Waterproof Mp3 Players

[laworder]

Anyone out there that does a lot of swimming and uses one of these?

I have had a couple of Nu-Dolphin ones, first one bought off Trademe for 60 bucks was quite good until it up and died about 9 months after I got it. In the interim I got this cheap Chinese knockoff one called an Atlantis, which lasted about 6 months, but it did have plenty of space being 4Gb. Then bought another 2Gb Nu-Dolphin new, but am sending it back as it has had no end of issues - capacity less than advertised, poor battery life, and now it has gone into random mode and I cant reset it to get it out of random mode. Pretty crap for something new out of the box

Was thinking of getting a Speedo Aquabeat, but they are quite dear ($250 for 2Gb) and I see a lot online about people having to return these as well. I dont want to lay out that sort of money for something that wont last.

It'd be nice to have something that I know will just work, as I swim about an hour a day doing laps and music makes this far more pleasant. Sound quality doesn't have to be the ultimate in audiophile quality, just so long as it is reasonably loud with some bass

Regards
Peter

[laworder]

Well I bit the bullet and bought the Speedo Aquabeat from Swim T3 which is close by home and not far out of the way on my daily cycle commute if I have to return it under warranty.

Pluses - gobs of volume! Headphones are great once you can get them fitted into your ears, and once there is a good airtight seal, the bass is pretty good. Nice easy to use controls, much better than anything else I've had, and the headphones have a nice short coiled lead so it doesnt get all tangled up in my goggles

Minuses - Plays tracks in a completely random order, unless you put all tracks in the root folder of the player AND number them in a very unusual and specific way - you need to precede each track name with a three digit number, i.e. 001, 002, 010, 015, up to 100, 101 and so on, otherwise it goes straight from track 10 to track 100! And it cannot be made to read folders or subfolders sequentially, all quite bizarre, especially for something as new as this. It has something to do with the Unicode values of the files.

Guy in the shop said it couldnt play material in folders at all, which wasnt quite true, it just couldnt play them in any sane order!
Will have to see how it goes reliability wise and to see how long it hold out between charges

Regards
Peter J