Rating: 
Summary: Powerful Miniature
Review:
Don't be fooled by this mini-CD player's small build and lack of aesthetics. It actually packs a whole deal of punch. It recognizes MP3 CDRs and CDRWs quickly and plays well with the antishock working to its fullest. In most cases, the player loads the song into memory and stops spinning after a while minimising the possibility of skips. Sound reproduction is good especially when a good pair of earphones or buds are used. It's very light even with the 2 AAA batteries. The preset equalizers dun do much cos the Normal mode is all you ever wanted. Its fully functional remote comes with a 2-line LCD which though small packs a lot of info, from artist name, song title, and yes even album title to track/directory numbers and time elapsed. Also includes the various random, programmable modes etc. There's also a useful file or directory skip that makes searching easier.
Now some of the downsides. There's no screen on the player itself, the remote LCD isn't backlit, which means u can't see anything in the dark.The plastic casing's a little flimsy and a metal body could take care of that as well as reduce the thickness a little. The rechareable batteries are a good concept but they just arent powerful and you dunno when they are ready from charging cos there's no indication. Oh ya, there's no resume function to continue from where you last hit stop. And lastly, mebbe a more attractive exterior using Compaq'a colored-cover concept from Presario would be cool!
But for a low price, the player's a star. And mini CdR/RWs are so [inexpensive], you can pack about 35-40 songs on one. There's nothing to complain for this price.
Rating: 
Summary: feature rific
Review: Comes with NMhydride rechargable batteries that can be charged while in the unit. Also, the player reads the mp3 into its ram effectively making it skip free (after the initial read of a few seconds). CD burning is fine, I use the standard Joliet file system and the player read all of my disks so far. I recommend this player over the others out there due to price and features.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome little unit. Very well made. Super shock protection
Review: First thing I notice when I first used it is that they provided 2 AAA batteries NIMH that last about 5-7 hours of play and you can charge with the wall adapter. You can purchase other NIMH batteries for a low price to have extra power when needed.
Sound: The Ear phones are awesome and the sound of the actual unit is better than average. With another earphone unit with extra base, you can feel the base rip trough your ear drums. I have couple of MP3 players that I own: Pine, Coby, and Jwin and to tell you the truth, the sound of the PM-1 surpasses these others in sound output. Also the 5 different sound options, rock, classical, pop, jazz, and normal give you the power to control the tone. Play performance:
I use this unit for the gym where I move constantly and harshly. This unit is basically shock proof.(nothing is proof but this come close to it). The CD moves for about 12 seconds until the song is in its memory and will play from that. I have not received a jump since I bought it except when the battery is low. It reads into memory 8 miniutes of music to prevent the jump of music. Other:
This has a nice clip on display panel where it shows the file name or the ID3 tag. The buttons are in perfect areas for easy reach. The only draw back is that the unit does not have an actual display panel and the clip on display pannel is the only place you can see the names. I guess who cares about that. I bought cheap 8cm CD-R and it work perfectly. Even in one cd that I had a burning error and did not finish the table of contents or TOC, the PM-1 was able still to read the cd-r. My other MP3 players did not even do that. Not so hot about it:
Have to have a CD-RW to make CD's
no case
Hard plastic package.(This thing took me 5 minutes to open with a blade). Compaq next time put this thing inside a box!!!!
No FM(for $... what do you expect) Conclusion:
For anyone who is looking for a real portable, super sounding MP3 unit with great features, this is the unit to buy. Unlike smart media card, multimedia card, minidisc, and Dataplay players, the 8cm cd-r is as cheap as regular cd-r's and you can even have many songs for fraction of the cost. We'll it even reads CD-RW so you can buy one for less than a dollar and re-record over and over. Since this unit surpasses many mp3 players, this unit is a fabulous deal for $... 1-25-02...
Rating:
Summary: Awesome little unit. Very well made. Super shock protection
Review: First thing I notice when I first used it is that they provided 2 AAA batteries NIMH that last about 5-7 hours of play and you can charge with the wall adapter. You can purchase other NIMH batteries for a low price to have extra power when needed. Sound: The Ear phones are awesome and the sound of the actual unit is better than average. With another earphone unit with extra base, you can feel the base rip trough your ear drums. I have couple of MP3 players that I own: Pine, Coby, and Jwin and to tell you the truth, the sound of the PM-1 surpasses these others in sound output. Also the 5 different sound options, rock, classical, pop, jazz, and normal give you the power to control the tone. Play performance:
I use this unit for the gym where I move constantly and harshly. This unit is basically shock proof.(nothing is proof but this come close to it). The CD moves for about 12 seconds until the song is in its memory and will play from that. I have not received a jump since I bought it except when the battery is low. It reads into memory 8 miniutes of music to prevent the jump of music. Other:
This has a nice clip on display panel where it shows the file name or the ID3 tag. The buttons are in perfect areas for easy reach. The only draw back is that the unit does not have an actual display panel and the clip on display pannel is the only place you can see the names. I guess who cares about that. I bought cheap 8cm CD-R and it work perfectly. Even in one cd that I had a burning error and did not finish the table of contents or TOC, the PM-1 was able still to read the cd-r. My other MP3 players did not even do that. Not so hot about it:
Have to have a CD-RW to make CD's
no case
Hard plastic package.(This thing took me 5 minutes to open with a blade). Compaq next time put this thing inside a box!!!!
No FM(for $... what do you expect) Conclusion:
For anyone who is looking for a real portable, super sounding MP3 unit with great features, this is the unit to buy. Unlike smart media card, multimedia card, minidisc, and Dataplay players, the 8cm cd-r is as cheap as regular cd-r's and you can even have many songs for fraction of the cost. We'll it even reads CD-RW so you can buy one for less than a dollar and re-record over and over. Since this unit surpasses many mp3 players, this unit is a fabulous deal for $... 1-25-02...
Rating:
Summary: Great Travel Companion
Review: I got rid of a full sized CD-MP3 player for this and have never looked back. The sound is fantastic and the tracking is excellent. It is also easy on batteries when you forget to charge the two 'AAA' rechargeable that come with the unit. I travel a bunch and the iPAQ produced beautiful sounds on a flight from DC to LA and back on one set of batteries. I like old radio shows. One disk will hold over 20 hours of radio shows. Tip #1: Ditch the supplied headphones. They didn't fit and have a limited range. Plus they let in too much outside noise. Tip #2: If you fly a lot, invest in a pair of noise canceling headphones. I have found that the AIWA or Jensen perform equal or better than the BOSE and cost only a fraction. Tip #3: Since the software supplied is very pedestrian, replace it with almost any free downloaded ripper and even the CD cutter that came with your CD-RW drive. Tip #4: Buy the 3.5" disks in bulk. They are much cheaper that way. Tip #5: Label all of your tracks. There is no ability to go directly to a track or select the sequence that I have found that consistently works. "Next" and "Back" are about all you get. Tip #6: If you use MUSICMATCH Jukebox do not perform volume leveling on your music before you cut the CD-Rs. For some reason this blocks the iPAQ's ability to read the title and artist data. Since the player, control unit, and headphones all fit nicely in your briefcase, it is truly a portable unit. Need sound for a group, add a pair of good travel speakers and you are all set.
Rating:
Summary: Great Travel Companion
Review: I got rid of a full sized CD-MP3 player for this and have never looked back. The sound is fantastic and the tracking is excellent. It is also easy on batteries when you forget to charge the two `AAA' rechargeable that come with the unit. I travel a bunch and the iPAQ produced beautiful sounds on a flight from DC to LA and back on one set of batteries. I like old radio shows. One disk will hold over 20 hours of radio shows. Tip #1: Ditch the supplied headphones. They didn't fit and have a limited range. Plus they let in too much outside noise. Tip #2: If you fly a lot, invest in a pair of noise canceling headphones. I have found that the AIWA or Jensen perform equal or better than the BOSE and cost only a fraction. Tip #3: Since the software supplied is very pedestrian, replace it with almost any free downloaded ripper and even the CD cutter that came with your CD-RW drive. Tip #4: Buy the 3.5" disks in bulk. They are much cheaper that way. Tip #5: Label all of your tracks. There is no ability to go directly to a track or select the sequence that I have found that consistently works. "Next" and "Back" are about all you get. Tip #6: If you use MUSICMATCH Jukebox do not perform volume leveling on your music before you cut the CD-Rs. For some reason this blocks the iPAQ's ability to read the title and artist data. Since the player, control unit, and headphones all fit nicely in your briefcase, it is truly a portable unit. Need sound for a group, add a pair of good travel speakers and you are all set.
Rating:
Summary: A versatile player at a very reasonable price.
Review: I've been using an older Diamond Rio SE for about 3 years now quite happily at the gym but recently, I've been needing something with much more storage capacity. The solid state/flash memory based devices are bulletproof, but alas adding extra memory gets really pricy really fast. The iPod is an almost perfect mp3 player, but way too expensive and not really usable for us PC owners...yet. I have had my eye on a reasonably priced 8cm CD-R/CD-RW based device for awhile now and the Compaq PM-1 has filled my requirements quite nicely. It is a bit thicker than I'd like, a metal body would have taken care of this and would have been nicer, but what do you expect for a measly $...? Additional 8cm mini CD-R's are pretty cheap (about $.30-.50 ea) with CD-RW's being about double that. You get around 185 MB on one of these; plenty of room for 40 odd MP3's (depending on your encoding rate). Now I can finally use higher bitrate MP3's and carry a sizable music library with me in a compact 4"x4"x1.25" package. The remote control pod/display is quite nice and the PM-1 was able to recognize my ID3 tags without a hitch. A bigger screen would have been nice to minimize the scrolling. A quick test disk burned on a 4x CD-RW worked flawlessly, all directories and sub directories were read correctly and all files were found without a hitch. I even burned it as a Multisession disk and left it open and there wasn't a problem. Nice if you're going to do incremental additions to a disc. Tracks can be navigated sequentially as well as by directory names. 32 step playlist programming capabilities, multiple random shuffle options as well as intro scan is also possible. The volume level is excellent and aside from a low level hiss when the unit is turned on but not playing, the sound is quite clean with a good frequency response and dynamic range. More than good enough for travel/exercise purposes, but it will probably show it's limitations when hooked up to a real stereo system. The anti-shock protection works well, like the iPod, the CD spins only when initially reading the TOC and cataloging the MP3 files on initial powerup and when initially reading a MP3 track into the 8MB memory. The rest of the time, the unit isn't spinning the CD and saving on batteries by playing from the memory buffer. There are several decent pre-set EQ settings (Normal, Classical, Pop, Jazz, Rock) but no user settings possible. You know, for the price, you won't be able to beat the PM-1's size, flexibility and performance.
Rating:
Summary: PM-1 Owner Update
Review: I've had this thing about a month now and I thought I'd update my original review "A versatile player at a very reasonable price." It works fine with any mp3 file formats I've thrown at it including high bit rate CBR and VBR files. Reads ID3v1 tags flawlessly and deals with long filenames well. Too bad subdirectories/folders are just referred to by number as opposed to their names. Shock protection is excellent, used it snowboarding without a single skip and batteries lasted just over 4 hours. I was initially worried that the long cord to the remote combined with the long cord from the remote to the headphone would be a royal pain but it acutally came in handy. I was able to put the PM-1 in the inside breast pocket of my Burton jacket, route the remote down my left sleeve and clip it to the inside of my wrist and route the headphone wire back up the sleeve and out the collar to my head. This left the remote well protected and warm (good thing b/c the cold temp will make the LCD display very sluggish and appear faded, wonder what the freezing temp of the LCD is?) yet still workable through my sleeve's fabric w/o taking off my gloves. Need to modify my jacket to have a transparent window and clip on pocket inside it for the remote for full functionality! The "hiss" you hear when this thing is on is still a bit annoying but isn't noticable at all if you are in anything but a completely silent environment or active at all once the music gets going. Not exactly "Hi-Fi" but what the heck, we are talking about playing MP3's after all, not DVD-Audio or SACD's.
Rating:
Summary: Good Player, Headphone, BUT they don't match.
Review: It's small, light weight, doesn't look cool. The player can charge the included two batteries. The included software is useless to me, as I have more advanced, highly appreciated streambox ripper 2.009 which can encode to the low limit of 8kBps and 8000Hz and high limit of 256Kbps and 44kHz from wav,mp3,ram!. The player can play mp3's of all the range above. The LCD can show file name, song title, and author name. I encoded 15 hours of music on a single CD. Of course they are 16Kbps and 50Kpbs. The most important part should be sound quality. I have read from amazon reviews that there is buzz background noise, and I did hear it and annoyed by it, and even intended to return it. However I tried to use a cheapist headphone for no reason, and the noise is complete gone. Then I put the original headphone back, and I heard the noise again. So I decided that the headphone must have been cheaper than the cheapist. Before I had threw it away, I plugged it in my computer and listened some music. Supprisingly there was no noise at all, and the sound quality was much better than my cheapist headphone. So I decided to keep it for other use except to use it with the mini CD player. My concludsion is that both the player and the headphone are of high quality, BUT they don't match!!! What a mistake compaq made! My personal feeling about it is that it's relatively cheap for its functions---value(5); the sound quality is good except they shipped with a mismatched headphone---performance(4);there is no LCD display on the play, making it unconvienient when not using inline remote---ease of use(4); and the average is rounded to 4. But for the player alone, 5 star.
Rating: 
Summary: not bad but...
Review: its a good player. the remote control is a great feature. I have had it for 2 years now and it has just recently began to skip. i sometimes get disc read errors, and will probably have to buy a new cd player soon. it is a little bulkier than i would have liked, but overall it has been good for the last 2 years. The player its self doesn't have any lcd screen, so you don't really know whats' going on. the head phones are good and the rechargable batteries are great.
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