Rio 800

Originally developed by Diamond Multimedia, the Rio has been one of the most successful MP3 players released in the last couple of years. In fact, it's been so successful that Diamond has capitalised on the Rio brand by changing its own name to Rio Digital Audio.

But, like most MP3 players, the early Rio models had one major limitation. Their built-in storage capacity was pretty limited: just 32Mb or 64Mb for the existing Rio 600 model. You could buy additional memory modules if you wanted but these were still limited to 32Mb or 64Mb, which meant that you needed to carry several of them around if you wanted to store more than an hour or so of music.

The Rio 800, however, has a much healthier 128Mb of storage as standard, which will allow you to store twice as much music as the previous version.

The manufacturer claims you can store up to four hours of music, but that's a little optimistic. You'd need to compress your MP3 files pretty intensely to squeeze quite that much onto the Rio, and this would almost certainly cause noticeable degradation in the audio quality.

Even so, you can still store two hours worth of music on it quite comfortably using a data rate of 128Mbps, and that level should produce pretty good sound quality. You might even manage three hours if you're happy to experiment with the compression settings. The other new feature is a small built-in microphone, which allows you to make voice recordings and store them on the Rio.

At around £300 the Rio 800 is pretty expensive, but maybe you can pretend that you're using the microphone to dictate notes for work and then try and put it down on your next expenses claim. We're sure they'll understand.

Specifications:

• Portable MP3 player
• Also supports Windows Media Audio format
• 128Mb 'backpack' storage module
• Rechargeable 10-hour battery
• Built-in microphone for voice recording.

Minimum requirements: Windows 98, Me or 2000, or Mac OS 8.6; USB port; 32Mb hard disk space.

Contact: Rio Digital Audio
01189 444477
www.riohome.com.

See also:

Olympus DM-1

A cunning blend of MP3 player and digital dictaphone.  12 Nov 2001

RioVolt digital audio player.

A great portable music machine.  06 Nov 2001

Archos Jukebox 6000

With its 6Gb of memory, this is the monster of all MP3 players.  25 Jul 2001

TerraTec M3PO Go!

A portable audio CD player that can also cope with MP3s.  24 Jul 2001

Intel Pocket Concert MP3 player

The Pocket Concert sounds as good as it looks.  23 May 2001

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