I have spent a considerable amount of time here at JAMM, and also at Gear Diary, reviewing portable media players.  One thing I have noticed is that a stand-alone review is really not the best format to help users answer the real question on everyone’s mind: which one should I buy?  While a review is nice, it looks at a particular media player in a vacuum.  The missing piece in the review is how this one compares to the others.  And that is what I want to try to accomplish through this series.

So, in addition to the Sandisk Sansa View, which I already own, I went on eBay and gobbled up a  Microsoft Zune, Samsung YP-P2, and Creative Zen X-Fi.  Heck, I even got the Sony Walkman A828 back on an extended loan.  After considerable thought, I also replaced my iPod Touch with the new fourth generation iPod Nano for this series.

Has this been done before? Doug Goldring has just begun a series pitting not two, not four, but six portable media players against each other! Be sure to keep your eye on JAMM, where he will be focusing “on a specific feature in each article, and compar[ing] the six major portable media players to determine which ones rise to the top, and which ones scrape off the bottom of the barrel.  If it can be measured and compared, then [he plans] to do so. ”

Doug’s daily portable media player is an iPod touch, so it will be interesting to see if he can’t help but slip in a few random references back to it.

In his series, Doug will be comparing the Creative Zen X-fi (8 GB), the Microsoft Zune Slim (16 GB), the iPod Nano 4Gen. (8 GB), the Samsung YP-P2 (4 GB), the Sandisk Sansa View (16 GB), and the Sony Walkman Video NWZ-A828 (8 GB). Be sure to keep your eye on JAMM to see how each contender fares!

Link: Listen To This! The Great JAMM Portable Media Player Showdown. Part 1: Introduction