This shiny little unit is not your garden-variety cigarette-lighter-powered portable CD player, however much it resembles one. No, this player gives you something more: the ability to listen to MP3-encoded CDs, which, when you do the math, works out to far more megabytes for the buck than you'd get in a dedicated MP3 player.

This sharp-looking unit is one of the first in a new generation of devices able to play traditional audio CDs as well as MP3 audio files burned onto CD-R or CD-RW discs. Although we maintain a few caveats with the Philips eXpanium's somewhat clunky design, we were pleased with its sonic performance.

Portable CD players that can also play back MP3-encoded CDs are among today's hottest consumer electronics items. D-Link's first offering in this category, the sleek silver-and-blue DMP-CD100, does many things well at a very attractive price. But this model also has a few flaws that make it an imperfect player among this new breed.

The Casio PZ-5000 portable MP3-CD player is a conveniently sized midpriced player that reads standard audio CDs as well as MP3 files recorded on a CD-R. The PZ-5000's extended-play function plays up to 160 MP3 music files--without the expense or space limitations of a CD changer.

The Rio Volt portable MP3-CD player grants free listening across standard audio CDs as well as the MP3 and WMA (Windows Media Audio) files that you've recorded to CD-Rs and CD-RWs, letting you enjoy over 20 hours of digital audio from one CD (or around 250 songs). Plus, Rio Volt's large backlit LCD supports both ID3 tags and CD Text, simplifying song identification from any compatible disc, while 120-second antishock circuitry guards your listening almost anywhere.

The D'Music SM200C is a portable CD player that will play MP3-encoded discs as well as regular-format CDs, CD-R, and CD-RW media. This means you can burn MP3s from your computer onto a recordable CD (software included). The SM200C supports CDs of up to 200 tracks. To make finding a specific song easier, the SM200C supports ID3 tags. ID3 tags contain a small amount of data about an MP3 file, such as title and artist name, that can be displayed by the player. So, instead of trying to remember what track number a certain song is, you can see the song title while scanning through the disk, making it much easier to find the song you want. The SM200C will automatically scan the disc to determine if it's a regular audio CD or MP3 encoded--no special settings on the player are necessary--and will support encoding bit rates of 32 to 320 Kbps.