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Nike includes a funky pair of sports fold-out headphones with the PSA Play. They look cool, and when worn, press nicely into your ears so that the music is coming straight at your ‘drums. The flexibility of the bridge connecting the phones ensures that the earpieces are pressed snuggly into place, and there is little risk of the headphones coming loose or swinging off from sudden and vigorous head movements. The phones are collapsible so they take up less room when being transported – a nice touch that would have been even better had the PSA Play come with a carry pouch.

The PSA's foldable Headphones

Some of you will be glad to know that the headphones jack into the remote using normal 1/8” connectors, which means you can replace the phones with your favourite pair, if desired. Borrowing from a Rio design also, is the bypass for the remote, so that you can run headphones straight to the player, sans-remote. And run without the remote you may, if you want to extend the battery life of the player. Nike claims 13 hours on a fresh AA battery, but we couldn’t get past 8 when using the remote.

The PSA's Package

The main draw of this unit has got to be its lightweight design and its slant towards the sports market. The unit is small, ergonomically designed, and very, very light – at 2.7 ounces it is almost feather light when clipped onto your belt or worn with the included armband. This means that during your crazy exercise sessions, you won’t have a heavy player that threatens to fly off from overly enthusiastic motions. The armband is a sweet little number, it wraps tightly around your arm, and has a rubber cup into which nestles the player. It looks sleek, and it works flawlessly. The player also comes with a snazzy aluminum clip that you can use in lieu of the armband, but the clip isn’t nearly as effective. For those who don’t want to use the clip or armband, I also found it very easy just to hold onto the unit while doing any activity that leaves your hands free. Thanks to the large rubberized button interface, on the fly adjustments are a snap – you don’t even have to look to bump your playlist forward, or nudge the volume up.

The hookup, and the software

The PSA Play uses a USB connection system completely identical to the Rio series. It also comes with software that would be instantly recognizable to any Rio owner, because it’s really just the windows Rio software (Mac users get to use the SoundJam MP software instead). As such, it has all the strengths and weaknesses of the Rio manager. The software scans and catalogues all of your MP3 material, and then puts them all into an organizable database. You can then pick and choose what songs to download into the player, which is a relatively painless process, except that all of your songs are thrown together in a single HUGE list when you first scan your drives. At least you can do batch transfers of songs, which means that you can slip 64MB of music into your player in around 3-4 minutes (we timed around 3.5 minutes to transfer 60MB), without having to wait between songs. The fatal flaw of the Rio software? There’s no ability to re-order the songs once they’ve been uploaded to the player. That’s a pretty banal feature that some cheap OEM companies have implemented for other players, so I can’t see why Diamond/S3 hasn’t shaped up their software features.