HDD based SonyEricsson phone confirmed

[autopilot]

What's the attraction of gapless playback?

Dance Mixes, DJ Sets, Live gigs, Audio Books, Opera, and the many many other albums around that have tracks that blend into each other, like some Pink Floyd albums or newer stuff like the new faithless album.

[Funkstar]

and a lot of pther albums that you don't realise until you listen to them on a gappy device. The new Elbow album, Sons and Daughters.... a lot seem to have really weird phades that actually end on the next track. Don't know if there is a technical reason for this, but there certainally isn't a musical one.

[Aaron]

Yeah, there's a very good technical reason for it due to the maths involved in the compression algorithm. Obviously scientists aren't music lovers.

See Wikipedia for the full explanation.

EDIT: It's interesting to see that one of the formats which can do gapless playback is Ogg Vorbis. The W950i should support Ogg Vorbis via 3rd party software (OggPlay), but whether it will be able to play the format gaplessly remains to be seen. There's certainly the potential for gapless playback on the W950i.

[autopilot]

Another good link regarding gapless - http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

Even most players that support true gapless formats wont play them back gaplessly.

BTW, i wrote to PC Format a couple of months ago, asking why they never mention it in their MP3 player reviews. They actually made it the 'Mail Of The Month' (Jan issue i think), but i never did get my prize

[Funkstar]

Yeah, there's a very good technical reason for it due to the maths involved in the compression algorithm. Obviously scientists aren't music lovers.

I know there are good technical reasons for havinf a format that doesn't support gappless, i was speaking about the track breaks on CDs, many are a few seconds before they need to be, making the gap on MP3 even more obvious than it needs to be.

[TooNice]

for a 4gig player that i'll be using while walking around with a set of little ear buds or hooked up in the car, gapless playback is far more important than lossless or a line out.

Chang ethat to 40gig and i might agree with you, but i would rather have the larger selection of alums on a phone personally.

And that is exactly why I think that the iPod (and its likes) still has a couple of generations to go.
We are starting to hear phone with 4GB storage. Thats great, we are entering Nano segment. For commuting, I would probably pick the phone since I need the phone more than the music anyway. For the gym on the other hand, I would rather have a stand alone flash player (I don't bring my phone with me to the gym)... especially a HD based phone.

The iPod is already at 60GB though, I have little doubt that we'll see 80-100GB in the next gen pods. If all you have is MP3s, it is perhaps overkill. But throw in some lossless files, and it won't be (heck, several hundreds GBs probably won't be for those who collected albums over 10 years ago), and every bit of capacity increase will be welcome. I reckon it'll be quite some time for phones to catch up to that sort of capacity.

I have to admit the following though.. I tend listen to albums continuously as a whole at the beginning, but after a while, I tend to play it on random. This is perhaps another reason that I find continuous playback a nice touch, but not crucial

[alterion]

if they were ex71's they would be by far the best stock buds included with any player to-date.. their phones that benift tremendously from burn in and provide a "tainted" but very destinctive sound that improves with time.. now back to the phone is it S60/ other symbian os based? there are just so many great symbian apps like avalanche (I think that was the n-gage installer one) ect that it would be a great bonus if it was..

[TooNice]

I am pretty sure the W800i ships with the EX71, don't they? I never bothered taking out mine, but they look like it.

[Aaron]

now back to the phone is it S60/ other symbian os based?

It runs Symbian UIQ, like the SE P900, P910 and Motorola A1000.