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Long known for manufacturing top grade Networking and Data Connectivity products, the Taiwanese-based company known as "D-Link" has established a firm reputation in the PC industry for first-tier components. With 1,500 employees working in 16 separate offices worldwide, D-Link racks up over $300 million in gross sales volume each calendar year.

For the year 2000 D-Link is branching out past its well-known networking roots, by introducing a range of products geared for the audio-entertainment market, beginning with MP3 support. Thanks to the explosion in MP3 audio popularity, D-Link has introduced their version of a portable MP3 digital audio player/recorder, with 32MB of internal memory.

Whether or not D-Link's new kid on the block can compete with the current big guns of the MP3 portable segment (Diamond and Creative) is the question we'll be answering today as we take an in-depth look at the "D-Link DMP-100".

Armed with 32MB of non-removable internal flash memory, the DMP-100 MP3 player/recorder tips the scale at a diminutive 62 grams in weight (2.3 ounces). Its price tag is similarly light on the budgetary scale, as we found several retailers including www.pcoutfitters.com carrying the DMP-100 for under $150. For $150 consumers get a small, lightweight, portable MP3 player that also records mono voice and external audio in the same capacity as a micro-cassette recorder: through an internal condenser microphone.

The voice recording option throws an interesting monkey wrench into the whole MP3 player market, because it's a feature we came to rely on shortly after we began testing this unit. We didn't expect to become so enamored by such a simple option, now it would be hard to go back to a player that didn't offer this feature even if it offered slightly better audio quality. We'll talk more about the voice recording options the DMP-100 offers later. Let's look now at the official specs for the device.