[jackal]

yes it was very rudimentary but don't be fooled by badges, white surfaces, shiny bits and all that type of stuff. The PJB was zero bullsh1t and delivered where it counted.

it was made in tiny quantities on a tiny budget and at the time, the largest regular mp3 player you could get was somthing like 256 mb ! So its hardly suprising that it looked pretty homemade.

but it did what it was supposed to very very well. Namely, incredible sound quality that has yet to be beaten in my opinion (and the opinion of many others). Because it wasn't mass produced for maximum profit, great care was taken over the design of the audio quality. It had a very natural, open, non-digital or analogue-ish sound and was very loud when required. Anyone who has owned other devices like rio, iaudio etc.. will know just how bad the ipod is on sound quality and how for example overclipped the top end is on them and the general muddyness etc.. They can't even match up to the outgoing Archos models which are themselves far short of the PJB.

Also, the interface worked extremely well and getting to any track immediately was very very easy. It also featured true gapless recording (which I understand the ipod and nearly every other player out there today still cannot perform) so for DJ mixed albums, classical albums or pieces of music where you don't have a silence between the tracks you did NOT get a gap yet the album would still be split into individual tracks.

Anyway, things have moved on a bit now and we all have the luxury of video as well but it was truly ahead of its time back in 99/2001. I remember walking around with mine at work and people just couldn't believe it when I told them what it was and that it was 20gb. Even mp3 players were pretty novel at the time let alone one so vast.