While I don’t necessarily want everything on RedHat Magazine’s Geek Gift Giving Guide, they did have the foresight to add the Neuros Audio Player to their list.
The thing is sweet – open sourced firmware and open spec hardware schematics mean that anyone can write software/firmware for the Neuros. It already handles Ogg files (which are far higer in quality than equivalently-sized MP3 music files) and comes in a wide variety of models.
The coolest thing about it, though, is that the high-end models are actually two players in one – a mini-hard drive-based player with up to 80GB of storage and a flash-based player that has up to 256MB of storage. The hard drive is contained in a “sleeve” that fits onto the flash player, allowing you to detach it and take the (non-skipping) flash player to the gym or other such rigorous activities.
And, while it’s certainly not cheap, the Neuros is far more affordable than equivalently-sized iPods.
Boy, I’d love me one of those…
