Been a while since I updated.

Latest news in the Lab is the Iriver IHP-120. Man, this is a neat toy. It's a 20GB hard drive, USB-capable, which can play back MP3, OGG, WMA and WAV files. Yeah, it's an MP3 player, but it's a lot more than that.

I was trying to decide between this and the Ipod. I went with the Iriver for the battery life and the compatibility with WMA. I'm very happy with the choice.

Battery life has been outstanding. Yesterday I started at 8am with full charge, and spent the whole day with it on. Active listening was about 4 or 5 hours, including an hour in the car (Belkin Tunecast II transmitter turns the jukebox into a car accessory!). I went to about 50% charge at the end of the day -- somewhere around 9pm. I did have it off for a couple of hours over dinner, but still -- I got a good 8 hours of active time on half the battery (assuming the display is semi-accurate).

And it has a nice remote with LCD display and good controls.

I'm a happy guy.

I have about 9 gig of music loaded. That's somewhere around 100 albums, mostly in the best quality WMA files I can create.

In other news, check out MusicPlasma: http://www.musicplasma.com/