MP3 players: How to buy the best MP3 player Music playing mobile phones

Music mobile phones are an alternative to MP3 players

Rather than buying a new MP3 player, another option is to buy a music-playing mobile phone.

This cuts down the number of devices that you have to haul around and because you’re buying one device rather than two it can also save you money.

Mobile phone pros and cons

Early music-playing phones had little memory, poor software, fiddly controls and the sound quality was dismal.

New, dedicated music phones have raised standards, but even these don’t usually measure up to a good MP3 player – aside from the Apple iPhone range.

In combining the devices, designers have to compromise. Unsurprisingly, the music player often suffers: phones can lack proper playback buttons or the ability to navigate a big MP3 music library with ease, it usually takes much longer to load music on to mobile phones, the batteries don’t last as long, and sound quality can struggle.

Another drawback is that most music phones have limited internal memory and so rely on memory cards. While memory card capacity is improving, manufacturers often only provide cards that offer 1-2GB of storage (enough to hold around 250-500 songs), so if you want to hold more than that then you’ll need to buy a better one.