8. Rio Forge: An All-terrain Player

Like the Samsung YP-60V, this audio player is aimed at sports enthusiasts. But, except for the inclusion of a stopwatch function and an armband, the Forge doesn't get involved with clocking your performance. Its role is simply to accompany you with music while you train. And in doing that, it's highly successful. First of all in terms of autonomy. Powered only by a little 1.5-V AAA battery, the Rio Forge can operate for 19 1/2 hours without interruption. In addition, its memory can be extended from 256 MB to 1.25 GB by sliding in an SD or MMC card behind the battery housing. That gives you enough space for plenty of variety if you like long hikes.

The sound quality is also good, despite a slight tendency to de-emphasize the lowest frequencies. But an adjustment of the equalizer can overcome that little problem. As for the earphones, unlike the ones Samsung supplies, they stay put regardless of what you're doing and don't distort the sound. It just takes a little time to get them hooked correctly around your ear. On the other hand, Rio could have left the FM tuner off the unit. Its quality is so bad that even in the middle of town, it was only able to pick up 6 stations out of the 55 available!

As for ease of use, though, some improvements are needed. The problems start with loading the player. Whereas it has a USB 2.0 connection (with a theoretical throughput of 60 MB/s), the transfer rate was only 0.97 MB/s. And what's even more bothersome, the buttons are so small that you have to hold the player in both hands do something as simple as moving to the next song. Which means you, uh, have to stop running and remove the armband...