Wesley's Tool-Box

(Continuation of "The $14 MP3 Player")

Curious to find out what made this cheap MP3 player tick, I had to take it apart... carefully, of course, because I wanted to keep using it. You unscrew two tiny metal bolts, then have to unhinge the two plastic hooks that stick the top and bottom pieces together. The plastic hooks were a bit hard to get around, since it looked kind of easy to break. I did manage to do it without breaking anything, and the device revealed its innards.

While Apple iPod is dominant in most of the world's portable MP3 player market, there are always some niche products scattered around. One such class is the MP3 players that are very cheap because they lack any on-board storage. They use the flash memory cards you plug in for the storage instead. If you somehow end up with a flash memory card left over doing nothing useful, these MP3 players may attract you, despite common sense telling you it's money wasted. Here's my story.

M4300 was the smallest WM2003-based PDA-phone on the market before X501. X501 is even smaller. Let's see how they compare.

For those of you still waiting for this device to hit the local shops, here are the photos of what final production model CP-X501 looks like.

By request, here's the current state of the desktop. Picture was taken with MITs-M4300 which is now out of the official 'desk item', so now the digital camera on the lower right of the screen is now visible.