3. Transcend T.Sonic 310

When a Transcend engineer excitedly told me that the T.Sonic 310 is their "iPod Shuffle beater" I had to flash a polite smile and feel pity. It is one thing to design an interesting MP3 player, but quite another to take on the tooty fruity company directly, with all of the baggage that this entails, from quality to availability of content.

At first glance the T.Sonic 310 is in the same mold as the Shuffle, though it is larger than Apple's most basic iPod variant. Being about the size of a large USB pen, the weight and dimensions of the 310 are nevertheless rather negligible, and it certainly won't weigh you down if you use it while exercising for example. You can get it in either 512 MB or 1 GB sizes.

The 310 doesn't have a screen, like the Shuffle (and as we've seen, it's not like SanDisk put theirs to good use). It also doesn't have the option to shuffle songs into a random order, something the Shuffle, rather obviously, can do. The controls consist of a push play/pause button that needs to be held down for a couple of seconds to turn the player on and off. This button is also the only back lit thing on the 310, being used most notably to show battery charge status on a player which otherwise lacks any precise ability to measure the amount of charge on the battery. Below that is a touch sensitive pad, similar to that on the iPod or the Creative Zen, which is used to control volume and the skip forward/back function.

This pad is not the most intuitive in the world, until you get used to it. For one, it seems overly sensitive, and one would be well advised to switch on the hold switch when placing the 310 into a pocket, as any contact at all could have your volume going up or down drastically or songs skipping all over the place. With the aforementioned lack of a shuffle songs option, this is all the more bothersome if you want to jump around tracks, as you have to switch off the hold key to get things going again.

One odd design quirk is the fact that the + and - signs for the volume are on one side of the touchpad, while the skip track forward/back symbols are on the other. Logically, one might assume that the + sign is parallel to the forward button, and vice versa. Not so - hit the skip key parallel to the - sign and you will skip forward a track, and hit the one parallel to the + key and you will skip back a track. One gets used to it quickly, but it does highlight the manokleptiac nature of some control designs in this world (that's the opposite of kleptomaniac: someone who leaves everything on the racks and walks out of the shop backwards.)

The 310 connects to your computer via USB, as either a normal USB stick or via an included extender cable (the inclusion of which earns many kudos from me). Interestingly, you can use the 310 as a lock for your computer, a feature which Transcend has on many of its USB devices. The cover for the USB connector is attached quite firmly to the rest of the player, and you will need to pull and push to get it on and off. This is better than having it slide off involuntarily, however, so one can put up with the mild exercise involved in attaching the 310 to a computer.

You can transfer MP3 and WMA files to the device by dragging and dropping them in Windows Explorer. Sadly, however, MP3 and WMA is about all the 310 will play, so if you demand wide file support then the 310 might not be for you.