I like old radio shows. One disk will hold over 20 hours of radio shows.

Tip #1: Ditch the supplied headphones. They didnt fit and have a limited range. Plus they let in too much outside noise.

Tip #2: If you fly a lot, invest in a pair of noise canceling headphones. I have found that the AIWA or Jensen perform equal or better than the BOSE and cost only a fraction.

Tip #3: Since the software supplied is very pedestrian, replace it with almost any free downloaded ripper and even the CD cutter that came with your CD-RW drive.

Tip #4: Buy the 3.5" disks in bulk. They are much cheaper that way.

Tip #5: Label all of your tracks. There is no ability to go directly to a track or select the sequence that I have found that consistently works. "Next" and "Back" are about all you get.

Tip #6: If you use MUSICMATCH Jukebox do not perform volume leveling on your music before you cut the CD-Rs. For some reason this blocks the iPAQs ability to read the title and artist data.

Since the player, control unit, and headphones all fit nicely in your briefcase, it is truly a portable unit. Need sound for a group, add a pair of good travel speakers and you are all set.

The battery life is definitely not anywhere near the advertised 8 hours. I think I was able to get 4-5 hours out of a fully charged battery. Speaking of batteries, if yours run down, youre stuck - I wasnt able to make this player work off the regular over-the-counter AAAs. It seems to only accept its bundled batteries.

The whole construction has a rather flimsy feel to it, especially the CD door and the battery door.

Interface is nothing to write home about either - there is no display on the main unit, and the remote isnt backlit. The battery indicator on the remote is so tiny, it will be difficult to figure out how much charge is left. Even though all the player buttons are duplicated on the remote, you can only "turn on" the player by pressing "play" on the main unit. Which ... if you have it in a bag, with "hold" turned on, and accidentally press "stop" on the remote. You have to extract the player, turn off hold and press play before you can use it.

The unit seems to rely entirely on buffering for skip protection, reading the whole song into memory at times. This is problematic because the CD will have to spin up before the next song can start playing, and if you are walking and have it in your pant pocket, you may have to stop so it can find and read the next track without being shaken.

The sound quality is acceptible for the applications, and if you are OK listening to MP3s as CD substitutes, this device wont disappoint. The little CDs are incredibly compact, and take less than 2 minutes to burn, making this by far the most convenient and inexpensive removable media on the market today. I think mini-CD mp3 players are a terrific idea with a great future ahead of them, but Ill be waiting for a better player to take advantage of it, and so should you.

The most important part should be sound quality. I have read from amazon reviews that there is buzz background noise, and I did hear it and annoyed by it, and even intended to return it. However I tried to use a cheapist headphone for no reason, and the noise is complete gone. Then I put the original headphone back, and I heard the noise again. So I decided that the headphone must have been cheaper than the cheapist. Before I had threw it away, I plugged it in my computer and listened some music. Supprisingly there was no noise at all, and the sound quality was much better than my cheapist headphone. So I decided to keep it for other use except to use it with the mini CD player.

My concludsion is that both the player and the headphone are of high quality, BUT they dont match!!! What a mistake compaq made!

My personal feeling about it is that its relatively cheap for its functions---value(5); the sound quality is good except they shipped with a mismatched headphone---performance(4);there is no LCD display on the play, making it unconvienient when not using inline remote---ease of use(4); and the average is rounded to 4. But for the player alone, 5 star.

First, the construction quality is marginally acceptable. Made entirely of plastic it probably wont survive many or any drops. The remote separated around the jack when I used my professional quality Headphones -- Sony MDR-7506s.

The sound quality is satisfactory. As mentioned in earlier reviews there is a slight buzz, which is only noticeable in quiet situations -- Ive gotten used to it. Despite the buzz, the quality of the mp3s is fully reproduced at whatever bitrate they were encoded.

The product specs say 6 hours of music are possible on an 8 cm compact disc. This is only possible if your mp3s are encoded at a very low bitrate.

Another quirk that perturbed me was the fact the player would occasionally stop when my headphones were connected directly to the player, and not inline with the remote.

If you can deal with some of the quirks and the mediocre construction then this is an ideal player.

It works fine with any mp3 file formats Ive thrown at it including high bit rate CBR and VBR files. Reads ID3v1 tags flawlessly and deals with long filenames well. Too bad subdirectories/folders are just referred to by number as opposed to their names.

Shock protection is excellent, used it snowboarding without a single skip and batteries lasted just over 4 hours. I was initially worried that the long cord to the remote combined with the long cord from the remote to the headphone would be a royal pain but it acutally came in handy. I was able to put the PM-1 in the inside breast pocket of my Burton jacket, route the remote down my left sleeve and clip it to the inside of my wrist and route the headphone wire back up the sleeve and out the collar to my head. This left the remote well protected and warm (good thing b/c the cold temp will make the LCD display very sluggish and appear faded, wonder what the freezing temp of the LCD is?) yet still workable through my sleeves fabric w/o taking off my gloves. Need to modify my jacket to have a transparent window and clip on pocket inside it for the remote for full functionality!

The "hiss" you hear when this thing is on is still a bit annoying but isnt noticable at all if you are in anything but a completely silent environment or active at all once the music gets going. Not exactly "Hi-Fi" but what the heck, we are talking about playing MP3s after all, not DVD-Audio or SACDs.

Now some of the downsides. Theres no screen on the player itself, the remote LCD isnt backlit, which means u cant see anything in the dark.The plastic casings a little flimsy and a metal body could take care of that as well as reduce the thickness a little. The rechareable batteries are a good concept but they just arent powerful and you dunno when they are ready from charging cos theres no indication. Oh ya, theres no resume function to continue from where you last hit stop. And lastly, mebbe a more attractive exterior using Compaqa colored-cover concept from Presario would be cool!

But for a low price, the players a star. And mini CdR/RWs are so [inexpensive], you can pack about 35-40 songs on one. Theres nothing to complain for this price.

I have had my eye on a reasonably priced 8cm CD-R/CD-RW based device for awhile now and the Compaq PM-1 has filled my requirements quite nicely.

It is a bit thicker than Id like, a metal body would have taken care of this and would have been nicer, but what do you expect for a measly $...? Additional 8cm mini CD-Rs are pretty cheap (about $.30-.50 ea) with CD-RWs being about double that. You get around 185 MB on one of these; plenty of room for 40 odd MP3s (depending on your encoding rate). Now I can finally use higher bitrate MP3s and carry a sizable music library with me in a compact 4"x4"x1.25" package.

The remote control pod/display is quite nice and the PM-1 was able to recognize my ID3 tags without a hitch. A bigger screen would have been nice to minimize the scrolling. A quick test disk burned on a 4x CD-RW worked flawlessly, all directories and sub directories were read correctly and all files were found without a hitch. I even burned it as a Multisession disk and left it open and there wasnt a problem. Nice if youre going to do incremental additions to a disc. Tracks can be navigated sequentially as well as by directory names. 32 step playlist programming capabilities, multiple random shuffle options as well as intro scan is also possible.

The volume level is excellent and aside from a low level hiss when the unit is turned on but not playing, the sound is quite clean with a good frequency response and dynamic range. More than good enough for travel/exercise purposes, but it will probably show its limitations when hooked up to a real stereo system. The anti-shock protection works well, like the iPod, the CD spins only when initially reading the TOC and cataloging the MP3 files on initial powerup and when initially reading a MP3 track into the 8MB memory. The rest of the time, the unit isnt spinning the CD and saving on batteries by playing from the memory buffer. There are several decent pre-set EQ settings (Normal, Classical, Pop, Jazz, Rock) but no user settings possible.

You know, for the price, you wont be able to beat the PM-1s size, flexibility and performance.

Sound: The Ear phones are awesome and the sound of the actual unit is better than average. With another earphone unit with extra base, you can feel the base rip trough your ear drums. I have couple of MP3 players that I own: Pine, Coby, and Jwin and to tell you the truth, the sound of the PM-1 surpasses these others in sound output. Also the 5 different sound options, rock, classical, pop, jazz, and normal give you the power to control the tone.

Play performance:
I use this unit for the gym where I move constantly and harshly. This unit is basically shock proof.(nothing is proof but this come close to it). The CD moves for about 12 seconds until the song is in its memory and will play from that. I have not received a jump since I bought it except when the battery is low. It reads into memory 8 miniutes of music to prevent the jump of music.

Other:
This has a nice clip on display panel where it shows the file name or the ID3 tag. The buttons are in perfect areas for easy reach. The only draw back is that the unit does not have an actual display panel and the clip on display pannel is the only place you can see the names. I guess who cares about that. I bought cheap 8cm CD-R and it work perfectly. Even in one cd that I had a burning error and did not finish the table of contents or TOC, the PM-1 was able still to read the cd-r. My other MP3 players did not even do that.

Not so hot about it:
Have to have a CD-RW to make CDs
no case
Hard plastic package.(This thing took me 5 minutes to open with a blade). Compaq next time put this thing inside a box!!!!
No FM(for $... what do you expect)

Conclusion:
For anyone who is looking for a real portable, super sounding MP3 unit with great features, this is the unit to buy. Unlike smart media card, multimedia card, minidisc, and Dataplay players, the 8cm cd-r is as cheap as regular cd-rs and you can even have many songs for fraction of the cost. Well it even reads CD-RW so you can buy one for less than a dollar and re-record over and over. Since this unit surpasses many mp3 players, this unit is a fabulous deal for $... 1-25-02...