Before any major purchase, customers should consider what they want to do with their MP3 player. Christine Tantschinez of the Stuttgart-based magazine audio says a lot depends on an individual’s needs. They determine the size of the device, the pre-packaged components and the price.

“If you just want music for jogging, then go for a very simple model,” she says. A display might not even be necessary and you could get away with relatively little memory — just two to four gigabytes.

Customers who want an MP3 player with pictures and movies to take on their travels should look for models with long battery lives. Models that play 20 hours of music are fairly common nowadays.

Tantschinez says the manufacturer’s descriptions of their products are generally reliable.

A large display with improved contrast is important, if you plan to use the player as a digital photo album or a pocket cinema. The resolution should be at least 320 X 240 pixels. Lots of memory — from 16GB on upward — is a must for such applications.

But it’s also a good idea to ask yourself how much you really need to watch movies in this format. “Video is a criteria for purchase, but it’s seldom used,” says Wojtek Rudko, product manager at SanDisk, a manufacturer.

“Purchases are made based on functions. Whether that feature is used or not is often beside the point,” agrees Tim Bosenick, president of Sirvaluse, a Hamburg-based company that researches technical devices to determine how user-friendly they are.

User friendliness can suffer when an MP3 player has a lot of functions. When it comes to “usability,” less is often more, added Bosenick.

Tantschinez adds that sound quality diminishes with every additional function. If you value sound and think you can live without a built-in UKW receiver, then you should do so, she notes.

Bosenick says touch-sensitive screens, like iPod’s Touch, are often a plus. Such screens make it easier to modify a device to a user’s individual preferences. Displays only show functions that are actually used.

But a touch screen is not necessarily positive. Different models have varying levels of sensitivity to a user’s touch, says Bosenick. That can lead to faulty service or accidental launches of nearby function fields.

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