After giving two MP780s to my nieces for school work and play, they have found the devices to be very useful. Plus they seem to get a kick out of showing them off and explaining it's capabilities. Their biggest complaint though, is lack of storage space.. Apparently, they want to show the iPod kiddie crowd their MP780s can play music for hours as well,
(and not tell anyone it's mono
) in addition to being far more useful in school. Now, I've been using a PCMCIA hard drive and a Magicstor microdrive in my own MP780 and MP880 for a while with no problems, and the battery life was surprisingly decent. About 4 hours of continuous play time on a charge with the backlight off. Longer with intermittent access, of course so I wasn't worried about the power consumption. And the nieces have spare batteries they hardly use. So, I've been on the lookout for cheap multi-gigabyte storage, and found this. I think the biggest power drain is during writing of data. Reading back was fairly decent. Not the 6+ hours on CF cards of course. Maybe I should tell them to just write to the front CF card, then use the drive for drag-and-drop archiving. One quick burst of writing, and it's done. Heck, the nieces have been telling me their classmates want MP780s as well. Chiefly the ones doing a Quasi-Modo immitation with 10 pound laptops... With 4 pound chargers and 3 pound spare batteries.. That can't be good for immature spines, wot?
Looks like I'm getting turned into an MP780 dealer for the local school... LOL
It's depressing when you know many of those kids can afford an MP900 while I can't...
