Ok… I’ve been on the MP3 bandwagon for quite a while now. I’ve been ripping and downloading MP3’s since way before Napster ever came on the scene. So when I decided to purchase a portable MP3 player, I decided to go with a player that could handle my vast collection of tunes. After months of comparison shopping I decided to go with the iRiver H140. It seemed to fit my style and I’ve completely loved it (even if the 40gb hard drive is getting a bit crowded).

Anyway… I recently decided to combine my audiophile habit with something else I love… reading. I figured audio books would be a great way to pass the time during my commute to and from work. I spend about an hour our of every day in the car so I thought that time would be well spent catching up on my reading. And so I was introduced to Audible.com.

Audible.com is a cool service that provides audio books to subscription members for a small monthly fee. And now to the point of this pointless entry… which is to rave about the nifty new Creative MuVo player they sent with the subscription. I’ve always thought of small flash-type MP3 players as mostly useless. What’s the point of a player that only holds 1 hour worth of music? Well, I learned that they can be used for other stuff too. As much as my life was changed a year ago when I purchased my iRiver for my music, it has been chaged again with my new MuVo. Now, I must admit, I still think the MuVo is mostly useless for music, but it’s perfect for audio books and it has made my commute much more productive.

The MuVo runs on a single AAA battery and gets close to 15 to 20 hours of play out of that. Although there’s no screen, I’ve been pleasently surprized at how easy it is to navigate around each audiobook track. Because an audiobook tracks can be compressed quite a bit more before loosing a significant amount of quality, you can fit around 16 hours of audio on the compact 128mb of memory. And if that weren’t enough, the MuVo doubles as a usb flash drive. This means that no extra cords are needed to plug it in and it can be used to store much more than just audio.

Although this isn’t really a full blown review, there are a couple drawbacks, however they’re hardly worth mentioning. Unless, of course, you plan to use it for music, then my list would be significantly longer. But as I have no intention to ever use it for that, no worries.