I went through a bunch of music players too. I got the original MPMan on a trip to Taiwan one year. I think it had 64MB of memory, which meant I had to downsample to "radio" quality to get a full album on it.
I had another Rio that played off SmartMedia as well.
At one point I refused to get an iPod because it didn't have gapless playback so I got a Rio Karma instead. It was pretty good, but it has literally disintegrated while in storage.
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Went through way too many PDAs also. Several paper Daytimers (which were pretty expensive at the time), Sharp Wizard clamshell, Casio Windows CE, Palm, Handspring, and a Toshiba e800. The e800 was an interesting disappointment - it was the first to have a VGA screen, but it was also crippled by a horrible Windows Mobile OS.
Extending the PDA thing, I went through a couple of Windows Mobile phones, an Audiovox SMT5600 and an HTC Excalibur. Good devices hampered by a crappy OS. On a side note, I've been quite impressed by the Windows Phone OS.
The iPhone is probably the first PDA that I have used consistently for an extended period of time.
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EDIT: I forgot that I actually had the original Newton message pad and one of its successors too. I remember buying the original Graffiti software from the company that would eventually become Palm. Holy crap, I bought a lot e-junk in my lifetime.
Yeah. I got the IBM WorkPad 20x, which was basically a black rebranded Palm III. Used it... very sparingly. :) After a few years of it atrophying in a box somewhere I decided my life would be perfect if I had a Palm Vx. I even got a weird spring-loaded portable keyboard for it that sort of unfolded and docked with it. I think I imagined I would take more notes in class this way. In reality, I played a lot of Bejeweled on it and didn't use it for much else. Based on my experiences with these things, I shouldn't have expected that I'd get more out of my iPhone, but I really do.
I had another Rio that played off SmartMedia as well.
At one point I refused to get an iPod because it didn't have gapless playback so I got a Rio Karma instead. It was pretty good, but it has literally disintegrated while in storage.
--
Went through way too many PDAs also. Several paper Daytimers (which were pretty expensive at the time), Sharp Wizard clamshell, Casio Windows CE, Palm, Handspring, and a Toshiba e800. The e800 was an interesting disappointment - it was the first to have a VGA screen, but it was also crippled by a horrible Windows Mobile OS.
Extending the PDA thing, I went through a couple of Windows Mobile phones, an Audiovox SMT5600 and an HTC Excalibur. Good devices hampered by a crappy OS. On a side note, I've been quite impressed by the Windows Phone OS.
The iPhone is probably the first PDA that I have used consistently for an extended period of time.
--
EDIT: I forgot that I actually had the original Newton message pad and one of its successors too. I remember buying the original Graffiti software from the company that would eventually become Palm. Holy crap, I bought a lot e-junk in my lifetime.