A Californian company called Entempo is marketing a new hard disk-based player called the ‘Spirit,’ that sort of looks goofy (and probably a bit big, if it uses a 2.5-inch drive), but offers quite a bit of bang for the buck. For just $200—and as low as $140 at some places online—you can get a 20GB player with a built-in FM tuner, USB 2.0, 10-12 hour playback life, and voice recording. None of those are amazing features by themselves, but if you could pick up a Spirit for less than $200 that’s quite a deal. And really, if you think about it, there’s no reason these players should be costing that much more than the price of the hard drives themselves, these days, especially if they aren’t offering any software to go along with them. I’m interested to see where the commodity hard drive player market goes—if they can get the price down, they could replace external hard drives for many people, just as flash music players should (and have, to some extent) done for flash drives.
Interested enough, in fact, that I can probably forgive the name ‘Entempo Spirit,’ which sounds like the Science teachers’ rock ‘n’ roll band that inspires middle school kids to make smart choices about drugs.
The Entempo Spirit 20 [DAPreview]
