Sharp MD-MT821 Personal MiniDisc Player

My uncle bought me the MT821 in Taiwan for $250. I had asked him to get that model because my friend had it and I really liked it. Also, the Sonys tend to be a bit too expensive, and some of them are just plain ugly. Well, when my uncle said that he was coming to visit, I asked him to grab me a minidisc player before he came over.
I don't know what comes with the US version, but the one I got had the player, the remote, earbud headphones, a lithium battery, a auxiliary battery pack that holds a single AA, a little cloth pouch for it all, and a AC adaptor.
Well, I like the MD player a lot. I think it's a lot better than one of those MP3 players, which I think is absurd. They cost just as much as a MD player, you can only get music from your computer, and it promotes illegal MP3 activity. Also, they can only hold a MAX of 64 megs of music, which is about an hour of play time. With a MD player, you buy a $5 MD, record 74 minutes of music on it, and when you want to switch music, you don't have to plug it back into a computer--you just switch discs. 64 megs of storage is usually an OPTION on MP3 players. Most of them come with only 32. The 32 meg add-on or 64 meg replacement is normally really expensive, too. Well, the best part of MD players is that you can use anything as your source. You can record your MP3s onto it just like a MP3 player. BUT, you can also record a mix of your favorite songs off your own CDs, or new songs off the radio, or even plug in a microphone, hit record, and get some needed sleep as your MD player records your professor's lecture.
Well, if I was to list all the features of this MD player, I'd be here typing for quite a while. I'll just briefly run over the few that I've used so far. You can mix the songs anyway you like, and if you don't like the order, you can still move them around even after you've recorded them. If you accidently let the player record for too long, you can chop a song in half or whereever you choose, and then delete the part you don't want. You basically have complete control over length, order, etc of the songs. A cool feature of this MD player is that there's a record level control on it so if your source isn't lound enough, you can turn it up so that it's recorded at a louder volume.
Also, you can title the songs with upper and lower case letters, number, symbols, and (on mine) Japanese characters.
The remote is really cool. The display has the "indiglo" type of lighting. You can control a lot of the functions from the remote: digital volume control, play, pause, stop, track forward/back, seek forward/back, digital bass level 0-3, play mode (random, repeat random, repeat, repeat 1), change the display (name/swimming fish, time elapsed, time left), and turn off the display. If you don't enter a name for a track, instead of displaying nothing, there's a animation of a swimming fish that blows notes instead of bubbles.
The best thing about the MD player is that it's virtually shock proof. It has 40 second memory, so it's really hard to get it to skip. I haven't gotten it to skip yet, and it's normally in my bookbag, swinging back and forth and hitting my hip. You basically don't have to worry about your music being interrupted.
I'm not too sure how long the battery lasts. I'm guessing a couple hours. I've had it for a couple months now, using it almost everyday ont he way to and back from class and I've only recharged it twice-- once for the first full charge, and then one recharge after that.
Well, it's a great MD player. From the title of this article, you can tell I haven't used my Discman since I got this MD player. This thing is just so much more convenient! DEFINITELY worth the $250 I spent on it, and worth the $350 or so you'd spend on it here in the states.