The featherweight MP3 player you take out jogging will not keep you amused on, say, the 17-hour trip from Atlanta to Japan. Sometimes one or two hours of music is just not enough. That's why hard-drive-based portable music players have become an attractive option. Take the Toshiba MEG50AS Mobilphile™. Its lithium ion battery can play for about 18 hours per charge — and its 5-gigabyte hard drive can hold dozens of albums.

Though not the tiniest portable out there, the Mobilphile player fits easily in your hand.

Yet the player is no larger than a deck of cards, fits handily in a shirt pocket, and weighs about a half-pound with battery and removable hard drive installed. Now doesn't that make a whole lot more sense than carrying a portable CD player and an unwieldy bunch of discs? After all, the songs recorded on those CDs are just bits, and when you compress and transfer them to a portable hard drive like Toshiba's, they become lighter than air.

In look and feel the Mobilphile compares well with Apple's popular iPod. It comes in silvery-aluminum with a blue backlit liquid crystal display measuring 1-3/16 by 1-7/16 inches. A four-way rocker switch shares the front panel with three buttons: play/pause, player menu, and a navigation button that switches between folder display and individual track display. Two large round volume up/down buttons are on the right side. The unit comes with earbuds and a wired remote control with basic transport and volume functions. They are separate, so you can plug them together in series, use the earbuds alone, or use the wired remote with the mini-plug-equipped headphones of your choice.