Steve Jones mentioned why he chose mechanical, it stored more songs, in 2002 you didn’t have many gigabytes. The iPod was the size of a deck of cards, it wasn’t much larger. You listed an MP3 player you needed to add storage to, when SD cards were 8mb or 16mb for the period.
You could get 2GB flash on the iPod nano. I wouldn’t have liked the nex one, the battery life was probably worst, the iPods had good monochrome at the beginning, and the good ones they were fighting were the rio karma which also used HDD, battery, and the Archos were good too, and no different aside from the iPod needing iTunes.
Just a shout out to the Frontier Labs NexIIe. Awesome little MP3 player that took compact flash storage and ran on a AA batteries back in the day.
It was like 2001 or something. I had iPods as well, but loved that NexIIe.
- used the same media I had in some of my earliest digital cameras.
- could double as an external hard drive.
- ran on batteries you could buy anywhere, including lithiums.
- had an equalizer.
- displayed ID3 tags.
- had a blue on black backlit character LCD that wouldn't kill your night vision.
- Smaller form factor than the ipod and lighter (it was mostly air and cheap plastics).
It stood up to cold temps and wipeouts when out snowboarding. No special connectors - 3.5mm audio jack and usb.
Here's a period review. The fact that it's described as being smaller than a "pack of smokes" really dates it I guess. <:D https://bjorn3d.com/2002/10/frontier-labs-nex-iie-mp3-player...