March 7, 2008

Freedom…from WIRES. Best Buy’s Insignia Pilot 8GB Preview

For SO long I have been looking for a MP3 Player without wires. Sure, everyone wishes Apple did it (I don’t). However, Best Buy, yes you heard me right, Best Buy has come out with a store brand MP3/Video Player that supports Bluetooth A2DP Stereo Headphones!

Also, this MP3 Player is a Open Source fanatics dream MP3 player. It supports Ogg Vorbis. Ogg, for the uninitiated, is a non patent encumbered audio codec that’s vary comparable in quality to MP3. Also, since it’s patent friendly, you can use it with Linux directly out of the box

I also picked up the Insignia Stereo Bluetooth headset at Best Buy. The headset also has a mic in it so you can use it with your cellphone as well.Stay tuned to Gear Diary for a through review of this Open Source friendly portable media device.

Tags: Portable Media Players, Unboxing

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About Joel McLaughlin

View all posts by Joel McLaughlin

Joel is a system admin for a local college in Columbus, OH. While he loves Linux and tends to use it more than anything else, he will stoop to running closed source if it is the best tool for the job. His techno passions are Linux, Android, netbooks, GPS, podcasting and Amateur Radio.

Wayne Schulz

Joel what did you pay for this? And is this one of the bad boys where you can just drag and drop MP3 and movie files to the player?
Joel Mclaughlin

$139.99 on sale this week. It’s just drag and drop to get music on it in Linux. IN windows, I believe it syncs with Windows Media Player or drag and drop.
sandaili

There are quite a few problems with this player that keep it from being one of the best players. It frequently “freaks out” when you have Japanese, Chinese, or even European encoding on the tags. That makes for a very ugly, unreadable display. Even my Pink Floyd music ends up having crazy little symbols in the tags. Unacceptable. They said there would be a fix, but so far nothing.

Also there is some good and bad navigation. It is so close to being perfect, and yet so far.

L