Gemei's X21 looks like a thousand other MP3 players that you can find on any street in Shenzen, China... but it has one feature that others don't: support for the APE codec. If you're not familiar, .APE is the extension for Monkey's Audio type files. This is a lossless audio codec similiar to FLAC, and like FLAC, there are few hardware devices that support it. APE is a popular format among audiophiles so we'd like to see this option in other digital audio players as well.

Of course, with only 512mb of flash memory, you're not going to fit a whole lot of APE-encoded tracks on the X21. APE has a compression rate of around 50% so that 512mb is good for about one and a half CDs worth of music. And if they used cheap components in there then you might not be able to hear the difference anyway.

The X21 also plays MP3, WMA, OGG, and WAV audio, can display JPG and BMP images along with TXT files, and it has an FM radio tuner.

LINK (Chinese)

No X21 to be found on Gemei's website yet but it should be available sooner or later, somewhere in Asia.