Released: January 2006

Manufacturer: JNC / iAudio (COWON)

Description: Hard Disc based 20GB MP3 Player

In the fast-moving and constantly dancing world of personal music players, the JNC / iAudio 20GB M3 is a little bit long in the tooth. Using Hard Disk technology as a storage medium, the M3 has a 20GB capacity, as well as an inbuilt microphone and FM tuner which can be captured at the click of a button. For a hard disk player, this is an exceptionally slim unit – the main player is encased in an alloy shell that feels nice and sturdily put together – with the display and function buttons mounted on the controller. At first, I thought it was a stupid idea to have a separate controller with the display and manual interface on it, but the main place I use my MP3 player is the car (I don’t dance in silhouette mode with my white ear-plugs much). This actually makes the separate controller incredibly handy as you can change songs or scroll through menus nice and close to your face instead of having to pick up the whole device to view the display.

This is a very nice little unit, if you don’t need to partake in extreme sports whilst listening to MP3s. It is a little hard to find accessories for iAudio products in Australia, but there are several third-party products available that work with the unit. Also, due to this device using a hard disk, the battery life will not be as impressive as a flash-based player would have. It will slowly diminish over time due to the moving parts in the hard drive, but that is expected of all HDD players.

Rating: 4 out of 5