I’ve told you how I felt about the standard music players and their restrictions. So, let me tell you about what got me on this train of thinking. It was my modded Nintendo DS.

The modded DS works using a homemade operating system (OS). The Nintendo DS starts up like it normally would. Then you go into the OS like you would start a game. It utilizes a soft mod, so there is no hacking of the DS involved. You cant break the Nintendo DS. It boots and now you can run the DS like a media center. The two key features are playing backed-up games and the media player. With the media player, you can read e-books, view pictures, and listen to music.

Watch this video for a visual walkthrough.

When I didn’t have my PC, I was using the music player quite a lot. It utilizes the DS speakers like a boom box. When playing music, it will go into standby mode, so that it will use less battery. Pretty slick. I’ll use it in the mornings when I stretch or to listen to my Korean lessons out loud. I use the e-reader for game faqs. I’ll load text files onto the DS and revert to them when I get stuck in a video game. Therefore, if I’m on the train and I get stuck in a game, I can find the answer right away.

But, here’s the icing on the cake. Adding music, games, pictures, and text files to the storage is simple. The memory storage is a microSD card. I bought a 4GB card for cheap. Slide the microSD into the provided USB adapter, and it will function like any thumbdrive.

The thumbdrive will work with any computer, and everything is drag and drop. Simply copy your music from a PC to the memory and whooop there it is. There is no iTunes or Zune software necessary. I know where I store the music on my computer. I don’t need iTunes to build a library for me.There are no restrictions to music files it will play. (Well there are a few, but they’re moot). If you want to copy your music and files to another computer, once again, just drag and drop them off. Simple.

Why can’t my iPod or the iPod Touch work like this? (Well, I know why, but nevertheless…) I dont want to install iTunes or any chunky software. I want it to play any music or video format, so that I dont have to re-encode anything. Any PMP, should be this easy and I think there is: the Cowon O2.

I’ve read a couple reviews, and the Cowon O2 appears to have everything I would want. It will play a plethora of audio and video codecs. It has a big touch screen, built in speakers, upgradeable storage, and drag and drop file transferring. How cool is that? When my iPod nano dies as my primary mp3 player, I know what I’m stepping up to.