Nomad Review
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Creative Labs Nomad II
The Nomad II is the 2nd most popular portable MP3 Player and our current favorite. The price is a bit high, but it comes with more accessories, more features, and does a better job in our opinion.
What it does
The Nomad II comes with 64mb of memory, which is good for a couple of hours of voice files. Audio quality is good for voice or music. Navigation using the front and side mounted buttons is intuitive with a little playing.
Besides the standard mp3 playback, Nomad II includes an FM Tuner and Voice Recording. The built-in FM Tuner allows you to set 32 preset stations, and it can scan to set them for your local area automatically. This is a neat feature to have, especially if you have already listened to your stored voice files and want to tune in NPR or some music until you can reload. An AM Tuner sure would be nice, but no one appears to have that.
The Voice Recording feature allows you to dictate voice messages or reminders to yourself for later playback or uploading to the PC. The quality on these aren't great through the built-in microphone, but it is good enough. This feature would be ideal if you could pause playback of a voice file to make notes to yourself about something you just heard. However, you can't really use it that way because going from audio playback to voice recording is a bit of a pain and loses your place in the audio file you were listening to. Maybe they'll correct this in a downloadable upgrade.
The accessories
The Nomad II ships with a CD of the download manager you'll need to access the player. It includes the standard ear buds as well as a nice lightweight set of headphones. Another neat gadget included is a remote headphone attachment, which puts some basic controls for the player at your fingertips on the headphone cord. For additional cost, you can also purchase a car cassette adapter and docking station.
What makes it great
A couple of very minor features make it our favorite for listening to voice files. The most important is a way to pause playback within an audio file, then later when you turn the player on, start playing at the same point. With the Nomad, if you hit pause, the player will automatically turn off after a set period of time (I set mine to 1 minute). When you turn it back on, it automatically starts playing at the spot where you stopped. This is vital for listening to longer audio files, such as chapters of audio books. It also has great configurability, like setting auto-sleep in FM mode. All in all, the Nomad is currently our recommendation for the best portable player.
What it does
The Nomad II comes with 64mb of memory, which is good for a couple of hours of voice files. Audio quality is good for voice or music. Navigation using the front and side mounted buttons is intuitive with a little playing.
Besides the standard mp3 playback, Nomad II includes an FM Tuner and Voice Recording. The built-in FM Tuner allows you to set 32 preset stations, and it can scan to set them for your local area automatically. This is a neat feature to have, especially if you have already listened to your stored voice files and want to tune in NPR or some music until you can reload. An AM Tuner sure would be nice, but no one appears to have that.
The Voice Recording feature allows you to dictate voice messages or reminders to yourself for later playback or uploading to the PC. The quality on these aren't great through the built-in microphone, but it is good enough. This feature would be ideal if you could pause playback of a voice file to make notes to yourself about something you just heard. However, you can't really use it that way because going from audio playback to voice recording is a bit of a pain and loses your place in the audio file you were listening to. Maybe they'll correct this in a downloadable upgrade.
The accessories
The Nomad II ships with a CD of the download manager you'll need to access the player. It includes the standard ear buds as well as a nice lightweight set of headphones. Another neat gadget included is a remote headphone attachment, which puts some basic controls for the player at your fingertips on the headphone cord. For additional cost, you can also purchase a car cassette adapter and docking station.
What makes it great
A couple of very minor features make it our favorite for listening to voice files. The most important is a way to pause playback within an audio file, then later when you turn the player on, start playing at the same point. With the Nomad, if you hit pause, the player will automatically turn off after a set period of time (I set mine to 1 minute). When you turn it back on, it automatically starts playing at the spot where you stopped. This is vital for listening to longer audio files, such as chapters of audio books. It also has great configurability, like setting auto-sleep in FM mode. All in all, the Nomad is currently our recommendation for the best portable player.
