People everywhere are hooked on to music players – while driving, traveling, exercising, studying, or doing anything else. Popularly known as MP3 or MP4 players - these are much more than simply the instruments for playing music. Today these gadgets come with a variety of features and add ons – something for all kind of users. MP3 format was born in 1993 and since then there has been no stopping in compressing music and saving it on small and portable music players. High-speed broadband connectivity and wi-fi has made these devices even more useful for the pocket.

Major MP3/MP4 players are either flash drive based or hard drive based. Flash based cards save data in memory cards – internal or external; while the hard drive based ones have a inbuilt hard drive for storing data. Flash players can hold 5 to 10 GB, while hard drive players can hold 160 GB of data. This gives you the power to save your complete music collection, video collection, e-books, and other data on these players.

MP4 players

MP4 players let the users play video files as well – so that they can save and watch an entire movie on it. These players can also play formats like WMA/PlaysForSure (from Microsoft), AAC (from Apple) and ATRAC (from Sony), AVI, ATV, ACT, SMV, MPEG4, MTV, DMV, MPV and AMV, etc. You can also store photographs in JPEG or GIF formats in these players apart from listening to radio, saving contact details, record voice/videos, play games, etc.

iPod – the most popular MP3/MP4 player

iPod comes with extraordinary and innovative features, looks and capabilities that makes it the most popular brand. Users can save music and video files in it, categorize files, download podcasts from the web, and enjoy at their own leisure. There are many models of iPods available in the market; these include: iPod 5G, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, iPod Mini. These range from 512 MB to 80 GB of storage capacity.

Other major brands

None of the players have gained as much popularity as Apple’s iPod as it has different versions to suit all needs. Nonetheless, there are many brands like Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Olympus, Archos, Creative, RCA, Rio, Samsung, SanDisk, and iRiver.

With introduction of iPhone from Apple, all the gadgets are moving towards a small, portable, PDA-like hand-held device that is connected to the net and has all the desired capabilities.