To Flash or Not to Flash?

There are two types of MP3 players: Flash and hard drive. What's the difference, and which should you buy?

Flash players such as the iPod shuffle and Sony's MP3 Walkman store your content on a re-loadable memory chip or a removable memory card. These players tend to be smaller and lighter and have longer battery life, but also have smaller (or no) displays.

No moving parts mean Flash players are less likely to skip, which makes them ideal for athletic activities, and you don't have to worry as much about dropping or bumping them.

Available with memory capacity from 128 MB to 8 GB, Flash players hold less content than a hard drive player, but a 2 GB Flash player, for example, can still hold up to 1,350 songs. The 8 GB player of the Sansa e200 series is currently the highest-capacity Flash player on the planet. Industry watchers say that as Flash technology develops, it will move to hold huge amounts of data, making hard drives obsolete.

Hard drive players such as iPod Video use an internal hard disk such as a desktop computer. This allows them to hold a crazy amount of data such as your entire music collection and feature-length movies. The biggest iPod, for example, holds 80 GB, which is enough to carry 20,000 songs, 25,000 photos or 100 hours of video (or some combination of the three).

Hard drive players are bigger and heavier than Flash players, but the heaviest one is still lighter and smaller than, say, a portable CD player.

If you do the math, Flash players tend to cost more per megabyte than hard drive players, but the products are less value because they store less. You can expect the price gap to narrow as Flash players' memory grows over time.