ibiza Rhapsody: Feature-packed but lacking FLAC

There's some serious buzz floating around the Web at the moment about a new hard disk-based MP3 player, the ibiza Rhapsody from Haier America, a Chinese-owned company better known for its fridges. It looks damn near identical to the iPod classic, but offers a vast plethora of features few players can match.

Firstly, though it won't play FLAC, it supports MP3, WMA, WAV and AAC music, and MPEG4, WMV, M4V, AVI, H.264 and MPG video files. This broad format support can be exploited reasonably well with the 30GB on the inside, but we'd love to see a 120GB model. Also tucked away inside is Wi-Fi, A2DP stereo Bluetooth and an FM radio. There's podcast support as well, and cleverly, new episodes can be downloaded directly to the player via a Wi-Fi connection. High five!

The ibiza's 64mm (2.5-inch) display has a 320x240-pixel resolution, just like the iPod classic, and from what we've heard it's a decent enough display. The major downside to having a player so feature-packed is that the battery life is rated at a pathetically crap 10 hours. This is appalling, and enough to put most people off. For crying out loud, Creative's Zen Stone is smaller than a human ear and manages to last for almost 10.

Whether or not we'll see the ibiza Rhapsody in the UK is questionable, and there's no US price known just yet. Rest assured, if we see even the remotest hint of European availability, you'll have a review faster than you can say CNET TV. -Nate Lanxon