If you’re considering buying an MP3 player, but are wondering if a goldfish might be a better option, you’ll need to consider the two very carefully before deciding which is best.

So, here are a few ways in which an MP3 player is better than a goldfish.

1. Better memory capacity
   A goldfish only has a 3 second memory, which isn’t really suitable to get all of your favourite music onto. In fact, you’d be lucky to get the first line of Bohemian Rhapsody, never mind the whole song, onto the memory of your goldfish. MP3 players however have thousands of hours worth of memory, allowing you to easily store all of your music.
2. Doesn’t require constant attention
   You can quite safely leave your MP3 player for a week without feeding it and you’ll find it will work first time when you need it to. Leaving your goldfish for that length of time will most probably kill him.
3. Works in and out of water
   Some MP3 players work just as well in and out of water, so you can take them to the gym, on your bike or even while swimming. A goldfish however only really works in water, if you strap him to your belt and go jogging the chances are he’ll have stopped working after the first few yards.
4. Better selection
   You can choose pretty much any colour or design for your MP3 player, and can even customise your own design with some players. Decorating your goldfish is more difficult, as while they do come in a wide selection of colours, adding colour yourself could prove dangerous.
5. Shaking doesn’t cause any issues
   Most MP3 players still work fine if they are shaken a little, this way they can happily play your music while you’re running around and jumping up and down. Goldfish however tend to stop working after just a few shakes. It’s not advisable to take your goldfish with you if you’re planning on a cross country mountain bike ride.

If you’ve ever thought that you’re MP3 player was a little dull, a little lifeless, Sony believe they have the answer. They’re currently launching an MP3 player lovingly titled ‘Rolly’, which according to Sony actually ‘dances’ to your music.

Obviously this isn’t really practical if you’re looking to use your MP3 player while jogging, or in the gym. No, Rolly is pretty much only useful when you place it on a table top. Hardly music on the go with Rolly.

Rolly was unveiled at this year’s CES show, and perhaps would have drawn some interest if it weren’t for the proposed $400 ticket price it will have in America.

So what makes this MP3 player worth $400? Well, it will have a 2GB flash memory, but only 1GB of that can actually be used for music. The other half of the memory has to be kept back to be used for the software to power the whole dancing thing.

Something of waste perhaps.

Rolly does come equipped with some music however, so at least you’re getting a little extra for your cash. Together with the music, Rolly also has some pre choreographed dance moves to match the tracks, which includes Richard Strauss, Avril Lavigne and Earth, Wind and Fire.

The battery life is just 5 hours, but it does move about quite a bit and blasts out the music through its own speakers.

Rolly is a bit of a gimmick, but one that might entertain you for a few hours. Expect him to get a UK release sometime soon.

Young people in Nantwich have the chance to win an iPod Nano on May 29th by volunteering for a free health check in a scheme playfully dubbed ‘Pee for a Pod’.

The heath test is due to take place t the Guy Harvey Youth Club in Nantwich, and is open to both men and women.

The idea is to get young men and women to be tested for the sexually transmitted desease Chlamydia, and they hope that lure of being entered into a prize draw to win an iPod Nano is enough to tempt them.

The youth centre offering the scheme is run buy The Hub @ Connexions, in Crewe.

John Beddows, from Connexions, said:

Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted illness in the UK and affects both sexes, although young women are more at risk.

Many people often don’t know they have the infection as they don’t always have symptoms but, if left untreated, Chlamydia can cause infertility so it is very important for individuals to get themselves checked out.

The health test is very simple and completely painless; all people need to do is come along to Guy Harvey Youth Club anytime from 6.30am-9.00pm on May 29 and provide a urine sample.

The test is com-letely free and of course confidential. The number for Connexions is: 01270 251002.

If you’ve ever thought of designing your own home or making some renovations, you may wonder if you’ve got the talent, the vision and the design ability to make it work.

Jonathan Ive is one such man, only there’s no doubt about his ability to ‘design’. Jonathan Ive is the man credited with designing Apple’s iPod; and he’s about to turn his hand to renovating his home.

The home in question a Georgian manor house, and he intends to turn it into a eco mansion. He’s already splashed out £2.5 million on the house, a Grade II listed 10 bedroom manor situated on a 53-acre estate in Somerset.

The iPod designer is intending to rennovate the manner, making it eco friendly by adding features such as solar water heating, a reed-bed waster water filtration system and a biomass wood chip burning boiler.

At 41, Ive has already been labeled by Time magazine in their list of the top 100 most influential people on the planet. He currently lives in a two-bedroom house in California, not far from Apple’s headquarters.

As well as the iPod, Ive also designed the iMac and the iPhone, earning him an estimated £3 million per year.

MP3 players aren’t just for listening to your favourite music artists, or podcasts of your favourite radio shows. You can actually use your MP3 player for educational purposes, or even for entertainment such as fictional reading. Many libraries are now offering their books as MP3 downloads from their websites, meaning no late fees, no damaged books and nobody shooshing you when you laugh out loud at a funny moment.

Oakville Public Library in Canada is now celebrating a year of offering downloadable library books for its patrons. It’s system is called ‘Libraries on the Go’ and lets people download library books via their PC and play them on their computers and MP3 players.

They books they offer include fiction, historical and educational, so you can listen to your favourite fictional author while working out at the gym, or you could learn a second language while riding your bike to work.

The download service doesn’t limit patrons who download the audio books, allowing them to freely transfer them to other devices, including Smartphones and PDA devices.

In the next few months the OPL will be offering downloads that can be played on iPods as well as MP3 players.

Anthony Murphy has been using the OPL service for some time now:

I was introduced to the Libraries on the Go service last year and I use it a lot when I commute. I have listened to many books this year, only possible through the downloadable service as I cannot find time to sit down and read. I would highly recommend the service to anyone who wants to read and learn but can’t quite find the time.

With Microsoft’s Zune looking dead and buried following GameStop’s decision to drop it from their line-up, is there really anything that can challenge Apple’s dominance of the MP3 player market?

There have been many players released over the years, many of them with excellent features and performance, but none of them have looked like being able to eat into Apple’s slice of the market.

As GameStop have decided to stop selling the Zune, it proves that Microsoft’s player has failed where so many others before it have come up short. It shows us that retailers believe the iPod is the only real player worth promoting.

Apple’s share of the MP3 player market is massive, meaning other manufacturers are really just competing with each other for second place, for the scraps that fall from Apple’s over laden table.

Apple were able to get into this position by giving people what they wanted from the beginning; a player that allows users to copy their music from their computer to their MP3 player as easily and quickly as possible. That’s where Apple have always excelled, the usability of their software.

While the current trend continues we can expect Apple’s dominance to remain, unless the competition comes up with something new. They need to think outside the box and stop imitating each other if they’re to break Apple’s stranglehold on the market.

iLuv make accessories for portable audio systems such as MP3 players and iPods. They have just announced the release of two new high def radio players, labelled the i168 and the i169.

As iLove make so many accessories for Apple’s iPod, obviously with these new systems the iPod isn’t forgotten. The i169 radio unit comes equipped with an iPod dock, allowing you to use the high definition radio as an iPod speaker system. It also comes with an alarm clock, meaning you won’t oversleep when you need to get up for work the next day.

The i168 unit just comes with an alarm clock.

Howard Kim, iLuv’s marketing manager said:

HD Radio technology greatly expands AM and FM broadcasting capabilities with crystal-clear digital sound, text on the screen and hundreds of new digital FM channels.

The radio units will be released in the USA as HD Radio really begins to take off, covering 80% of the population. There are currently more than 1,600 radio stations in North America offering high definition radio broadcasts.

The US price for the radios is $169.99 for the i169 and $89.99 for the i168.

Everyone into MP3 and music downloads is familiar with Napster. They’re the company that famously offered the sharing of music on a grand scale, the sort of system that music industry experts feared happing when MP3 was invented. They had a famous and much publicised court case and then returned some time later, all legit.

Now Napster is a proper company, offering a legal service for music downloads.

This Thursday however their shares fell due to analysts lowering their price targets and issuing concerns after their forth quarter reports.

The shares have fallen 16 cents in the past year, 9.5%.

Napster claims their losses have narrowed due to the increased number of subscribers they have picked up and are predicted their first quarter revenue to be just below what the analysts expected.

On Tuesday Napster launched an MP3 music download store, which offers MP3 downloads free of copy protection. This means Napster will now be offering a mix of subscription services and MP3 downloads.

It is feared however that increasing music royalty costs could spell serious trouble for Napster going forward.

Fans of vinyl records will never agree that an MP3 player is in any way shape or form as good as a record player. They’ll insist that vinyl records are the only way to listen to music and that MP3’s are just inferior, low quality audio recordings.

They’re wrong of course, let’s look at some ways an MP3 player is better than a record player.

1. MP3s don’t scratch
   No matter how many times you play them, over and over again, there’s no danger of them scratching from the stylus. They’re as good today as the day they were, well, ripped.
2. MP3s don’t warp in the sun
   There’s no danger of your MP3 files warping in strong sunlight. Yes the player may be susceptible to heat damage, but the files can simply be copied to another device, no problems.
3. MP3s don’t take up much space
   This is the obvious advantage, vinyl records take up loads of space in the house and are very heavy to cart around. You’ll need a van to carry round your entire music collection in one go, you’ll just need a 20GB iPod to carry round your entire MP3 collection.
4. You can copy MP3s with no quality loss
   Every time you copy music you lose quality, from vinyl to tape, CD to tape etc. When you copy an MP3 you’re copying the file, it’s exactly the same as the original file. No loss in quality!
5. You won’t need to buy and sell your MP3s at car boot sales
   There’s nothing more upsetting than selling your records at a car boot sale for 10p each, when you paid £10 for them years before. You won’t get that with MP3s. If you don’t want the music anymore, just delete it… though of course you won’t actually need to delete it, because it won’t take up any space.

How does the idea of a surround sound vest sit with you? You know, a surround sound system that allows you to listen to your music on your MP3 player in all of its surround sound glory, but in a vest. A vest that you wear.

This rather bizarre concept came out of the recent Korean Trade Show, which showcased some of the most ingenious and crazy gadgets currently being devised, developed and thought up by some of the best inventors Korea has to offer.

The vest is known as the ‘Soundwalk Vest’ and is able to accomodate a MP3 player, mobile phone or any type of portable musical player. The vest has been designed to be worn by people doing physically strenuous activities such as extreme sports, mountain biking or hiking. The vest comes equipped with speakers mounted in the shoulders that blast out the music for the wearer.

How long it will take this item to hit the shops in the West, and how much it will actually cost is yet undecided.