Bluetooth is technically a rather old technology and wireless headphones have really never taken off, yet they're becoming an increasingly popular topic on our forum. A lot of the reason for that is that it's becoming integrated into players, with the Samsung P3 and the Cowon S9 among the newest, most popular models to have this capability.

Most Bluetooth headphones are behind-the-neck style for some reason and there aren't many normal type Bluetooth headphones. The Sony DR-BT22 is an exception, with a form factor and size that really doesn't look like it's Bluetooth at first glance. The DR-BT22 are on their way out, which has dropped the price from a MSRP of $99 to a sales price of under $30 on Amazon, which means these are perfect for people who want to go wireless. But are they any good?

Here is a look at two differ cases from I-Nique: the Tuff-Luv leather case and a standard silicon case. The first leather case is made of genuine leather that is nice and soft to the touch. All of the necessary ports and buttons are exposed and are easily accessible so you don’t ever have to remove the case in order to charge it or operate any of buttons. The top buttons are covered when the flap is down, but I found it pretty easy to individually press each of the top three buttons while the flap was closed.

In a battle for touch screen MP3 players Sony swung for the fences with a premium product with a price to match well above the competition. To those who have the extra cash to spend the premium price may well be justified. These unique to the competition features include YouTube browsing, Slacker Radio (US Only), direct podcast downloads, premium noise canceling headphones, and a semi-useful web browser.

Some of the highlights of this player include an amazing looking OLED screen with a capacitive touch screen with a lightning fast response. You can also expect great sound quality like most of Sony’s other players. Read on for the full in depth look at the Sony X-1000 player.

Many people might have heard of the unofficial kings of clip-on/ear-clip headphones. Their name is Koss KSC75, and their price is a whopping $10 (give or take a few) if you look around a bit. They don’t need to be ashamed of being compared to phones that cost a lot more.

With clip-on phones being quite the niche product there aren’t many fancy, higher priced – or even good sounding ones – available. Until recently only some Audio Technica products like the ATH-EM7 or EW9 fell into that category (to the best of my knowledge).

Then Yuin – a company already famed for other niche products, such as high quality ear buds – came along and introduced their G1 and G2 clip-on phones. Both of these currently got upgraded to the G1A and G2A versions, which obviously have improved bass and treble response over the former iterations.

The G1A are the “high end” variant, with a higher price and higher impedance, the G2A are the more affordable variant that are easier to drive with portable players.

Let’s take a look/listen at how they perform – not only in the sparsely populated field of quality clip-on phones, but also in the grand scheme of headphones in general.

Having players rendered useless due to a broken headphone jack is annoying. As we speak, one of my players is in for repair as the jack got loose and started losing audio on the left channel. The same thing happened with another player last fall when I was working a lot out in the woods and the cable got stuck on every single tree I came across.

There really isn't that much to do about such a problem once it has happened, but luckily there is something you can do to prevent it. Replug is a range of cables and adapters that are designed to break off naturally if the cable is yanked. I bought their basic adapter to see if it would help save my players. Read on for a review.

We have lately been taking a look at many of the new Noreve cases for some of the recent MP3 players. For those unfamiliar, Noreve makes high end leather cases for many electronic gadgets. The selection is quite extensive covering nearly all of the MP3 players featured on this site. Additionally, the product line extends to gaming devices, cameras, and even some netbooks.

The cases get pricey and fall in at the high end of the scale, but from the several Noreve cases I personally own, I feel that the price is warranted. The absence of brand price inflation is subsisted for good materials and quality craftsmanship.

Head-Direct, commonly known to the western world – especially the USA – as an importer of quality Chinese audio gear (Yuin, Darkvoice, HE Audio, etc), recently released a range of in-ear phones under their own brand name.

Ranging from the inexpensive RE2 ($39) to the RE1 ($139) and the flagship RE0 ($169) model, we’ll take a closer look at the latter one. Let’s see if the sound quality justifies the rather high price for a dynamic driver IEM.

Samsung’s last blockbuster was the P2. It was a hot topic in our forum and a player that we put on our Top 5 Players of 2008 list. With that, you can imagine the P3 is a highly anticipated device for current P2 fans and possibly some other-brand owners looking to trade up to a very solid feature set.

For many of the P2 owners, the question is whether the changes made to the P3 make it worth upgrading. The P3 is a substantial improvement on features, build quality, UI, touch, and video playback and is very worthy of the incremental name. I might even call it a “P3.2”

Sure we have plenty of complaints about Cowon O2 mainly dealing with the user interface, but in the end is still a respectable PMP with the signature warm sound typical to Cowon.

The O2 is too big to fit in your pocket which makes it a good candidate for a protective case since its likely to tossed into a bag or carried by itself. If you have read any of our case reviews you know that we are fans of the Noreve cases. This one is no different. Check out the pics below with some thoughts on the fit.

Our Swedish friends who already brought us the q-JAYS (among other things) are at it again with their newly introduced s-JAYS in-ear phones. Some people found the q-JAYS to have too little bass quantity and too much treble, so JAYS did a 180° turn and engineered the new s-JAYS with a quite bass heavy response.

Their price is half of the q-JAYS and the same as the d-JAYS, so they are certainly in an affordable price range.

We did review quite a few precise, analytic phones recently (like our Editor’s Choice, the Phonak Audéo PFE, or JAYS’ own q-JAYS), so let’s see how this new offering for the basshead crowd fares…

Here we have Cowon’s newest flash-memory based PMP which certainly evokes comparisons to a hypothetical “D3”, a successor of the Cowon D2 (at least in theory). It has the same basic design (yet bigger), a touch screen interface, and an SDHC slot. However, it’s certainly closer to the A2 or A3 considering its video capabilities.

The O2’s specs look absolutely amazing on paper – hardly any other portable player that comes close in supporting so many audio and video formats. On first glance it appears as if Cowon concentrated on the fundamentals, giving their customers a powerful device - an unrestricted video and audio player - that gets the basics right.

But we at anythingbutipod aren’t here to recite spec sheets or press releases. We rather check how the O2 performs in reality. Read on for the rather inconvenient truth…

One of the most anticipated players of this year is the Cowon S9. We named the D2 one of the top 5 players of this year and those users have been clamoring for a successor. Even though the S9 is not a D2 successor it does go a big step beyond with what I think is one of the more important features, native xvid support- no conversion necessary. It does also offer a much more usable capacitance touch screen compared to the D2.

After seeing how poorly the O2’s initial firmware was when released I was concerned there would be some stability issues, but was relieved to find stable firmware. But after all the waiting and all the hype that has been buzzing in our forums, does it live up to the talk?

With netbooks becoming popular so fast over the last year, laptops are becoming more of an alternative to dedicated media devices for portable use. While they are still bigger than MP3 players, they now have battery life and pricing that makes them good choices. Having a netbook myself and also being a Bluetooth nut, I've been struggling to get stereo Bluetooth audio on my Acer Aspire One for months. Normal Bluetooth adapters are normally very unstable and the process is the least user friendly I can think of. The people at callpod knows this, and have released an amazing product called the callpod drone.

The drone is literally plug and play. It plugs into your computer, pairs with a headset, and works. It's main feature is Bluetooth audio, and so it uses a whole other kind of process to get things going than normal adapters. Read on for the full review.

Since the reader comments on my Ultimate Ears UE 11 Pro review were quite polarizing (“best thing ever” vs. “who is insane enough to buy such an overpriced thing”) I thought it would be a good idea to give one of the less expensive Ultimate Ears universal fit earphones a closer look. We at abi aren’t entirely made of money – and neither are many of our esteemed readers, so it’s probably good to keep the reviews in balance, financially speaking.

Enter the Super.Fi 5, the newest (and cheapest) member in Ultimate Ear’s series of medium-priced earphones. The name couldn’t be any more confusing, considering there are two other phones from the same range available, the Super.Fi 5 Pro and Super.Fi 5 EB. It’s no surprise these new Super.Fi 5 “Without A Suffix” are often called “SF5 v2”, “2.0”, or “The New One” in blogs and internet forums to avoid confusion.

Read on for the in-depth review.

Sony has a very peculiar way of making MP3 players where they have a basic standard they build upon for every release. The players in the later years started with the 1st gen Sonic Stage dependent S600 and A800 series which were updated to use MTP with the S610 and A810. Now we've reached generation 4, but the basic layout of it all is still more or less the same as the S600 and A800.

The design is different, there are themes available, SensMe was added and there's a podcast feature. That's pretty much it and doesn't exactly scream for any Sony user to upgrade. The question is if these new features are any good and if the player generally has the same old Sony quality. Read on for a full review.