(Why I'm writing this at this moment I'll come back to...)

One of my goals for the Zaurus was to provide music on plane trips. However, the built-in player is really lame, my biggest memory card was 128MB, and the cheap Sony earbuds I had really stunk. Plus, I would get these really loud squeaks between tracks that were painful (I searched to see if this was a known MP3 problem of some kind).

So, before Christmas vacation, I bought myself two presents: a Lexar 512MB CF card and some Etymotics earbuds/plugs (not the unbelievably expensive ones, just the nastily expensive ER6 @ $130). I also decided to try the player app for the Zaurus from The Kompany.

In addition, since I had started reripping/encoding CDs to OGG, I made sure to re-rip some airplane favorites (sort of divvied up into Enya-ish things for sleepy time and louder favorites for awake time).

The results:

1) The Etymotics didn't blow me away, but they are much better than my previous Sennheiser/Sony earbuds and the earplug aspect is a great advantage -- essentially noise-cancelling without all the bulk and I could sleep on them.

2) Zaurus. Surprisingly, I had DC power in my seat in both directions on my long trip, so battery life was never really tested.

3) tKPlayer? Much better than built-in player, but not amazing. I still got those squeaks between MP3s, so assume the original player wasn't to blame....

4) OGG? Fine. I didn't have any duplicate MP3/OGG tracks for comparison, but no squeaks from the OGGs. I need to do some A/B listening before I encode much more to decide what bitrates/quality to use. The 512MB card is a big improvement, but right now the OGG file sizes I have generated are big due to my blase use of high bitrate/quality specs.

So, an iPod it ain't, but it is doing what I want, and I don't need to haul another player around.

Why am I motivated to write this now? Well, about 5 hours ago I got off a Seattle-->DC redeye. There was no power in the seat, but I can report that, to my surprise, the Z played at lowish volumes for about 3 hours (with screen blanked) and battery still shows > 80%.

Beyond that, asleep in 2A on this Airbus with Enya softly warbling through the new earplugs, I managed to remain completely unaware that - midway through the flight - the poor woman in 4B did a reportedly amazing projectile vomiting number on the folks in 4C, 4D, 3D and 3E -- or so the nice woman in 2B informed me as we landed. I like those headphones.

That's my report.