[Electronics-talk] Wow! Accessible MP3 Player For Only $10!

[Gerald Levy]

Well, it turns out that the Coby MP200 MP3 player may be blind accessible after all.  I did a little research, and discovered that the Coby MP200 is similar in design to the discontinued Creative Zen Stone that caused such a stir in the blind community when it was first introduced a couple of years ago.  Like the Zen Stone, the Coby MP200, which is about the size of a pack of chewing gum, has a concentric ring surrounding a Play-Stop/Power button on its front panel.  Pressing and holding it for 5 seconds turns the unit on.  Pressing the top of the ring increases the volume, and pressing the bottom of the ring decreases the volume.  Pressing the right side of the ring skips to the next track, while pressing and holding it scans rapidly forward through the current track.  Pressing the left side of the ring skips to the previous track,, while pressing and holding it scans rapidly backward through the current track.  That's it.  It has no display screen or navigation menus to deal with, just a LED power indicator.  Unlike the Zen Stone, the Coby unit has no shuffle play mode, so you  can only listen to tracks in the order they were downloaded, which, presumably, can be easily accomplished using simple Copy and Pate command.  With 2gb of memory, it has twice the storage capacity of the Zen Stone, and as an added bonus, it can be used as a flash drive for data storage.  It plugs directly into a USB port, but also includes a separate USB cable as well as a set of earbuds.  It runs on a single replaceable AAA battery (included) which is said to provide up to 8 hours of playing time, rather than a sealed, nonreplaceable rechargeable battery, which, for me, is a big plus.  So I went ahead and ordered one from J&R.  For only ten bucks with free shipping, how can you go wrong?  

http://www.jr.com/coby/pe/CBY_MP2002G/?JRSource=chemail.bfweekend.11142009

Gerald