MPIO FL100

...little known Korean brand called MPIO and their FL100 player fair? Well if it’s based on the brand and reputation alone, it’s already lost the battle (along with hundreds of other digital music players) to Apple and it’s incredibly popular iPod (and soon to be released Mini iPod). The iPod is to us what the Sony Walkman was in the early 80’s, the benchmark portable player of the day.

The MPIO FL100 is a solid state player which means ...
...iPod Mini look big. The MPIO FL100 is about the size of a box of matches, just slightly longer. It doesn’t weigh much more than a full matchbox either. Most of the body is encased in a scratchproof metal. Whether it is plastic with metallic effect, I am not sure but it sure feels like metal. The player does not look cheap and is a far cry from the cheap looking plastic USB stick music players seen around on eBay.

The fascia is finished ... more

In the current overcrowded market of digital music players all begging for your attention, how does a little known Korean brand called MPIO and their FL100 player fair? Well if it’s based on the brand and reputation alone, it’s already lost the battle (along with hundreds of other digital music players) to Apple and it’s incredibly popular iPod (and soon to be released Mini iPod). The iPod is to us what the Sony Walkman was in the early 80’s, the benchmark portable player of the day.

The MPIO FL100 is a solid state player which means it has no moving parts. Hard disk based players (such as the iPod and Creative’s Zen) have moving parts which make them prone to skipping. The good thing about solid state players is you can go jogging or the gym with them and not worry about the music skipping. The downside though, is the storage capacity of solid state players which currently only go up to 1GB. Basically the more capacity (in MegaBytes or GigaBytes), the more songs you can store. Apple’s iPod ranges between 15GB to 40GB which means it can store a huge amount of songs but at over £200 just for the bottom of the range 15GB, its pricey. So why consider solid state players given the capacity limitations. Well the main 2 factors are size and cost. For people on a maximum budget of upto £100, the only way to go is solid state players. Throw in the fact that most solid state players have radio tuners and recording functionality built in and then the iPod starts looking expensive.

Looks
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Most solid state players are really small. So small in fact it makes even the iPod Mini look big. The MPIO FL100 is about the size of a box of matches, just slightly longer. It doesn’t weigh much more than a full matchbox either. Most of the body is encased in a scratchproof metal. Whether it is plastic with metallic effect, I am not sure but it sure feels like metal. The player does not look cheap and is a far cry from the cheap looking plastic USB stick music players seen around on eBay.

The fascia is finished in a silver mirror design and only the blue LED display and two buttons appear to clutter it. The big arrow is a multi function button that allows the user to play, pause and switch the device on or off. The other round button on the fascia is the record button. Down the side is a host of other buttons which control volume, menu and a hold switch. There is also a jog dial which is very similar to the ones by Sony in recent years on their MD players and PDAs. The function of the jog dial is different depending on what mode you are in. In normal play back operation, it acts as the rewind and fast forward button. A simple press though brings up the menu option and once again this is dependent if you are playing a MP3/WMA or listening to the Radio. The blue led display is very informative displaying track no, track time, ID3 tags, and battery life.

Sound
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The player can handle MP3s, WMAs, ASFs which are stored inside its internal memory. There are 64/128/256MB versions of the player. The player comes supplied with its own MPIO branded headphones and sound decent enough for what they are. I recommend either a decent set of Sony or Seinheisser headphones. Witb the original headphones, the volume seemed to be quite low and the bass could be better. Although some of this can be attributed to the players internal amplifier, the change of headphones did make a difference and it was instantly noticeable especially in the bass department.

The player’s internal amplifier seemed to be a bit quiet for my liking and on busy train journeys, the volume had to be turned up above the half way mark to hear anything. I also found the equalizer settings on the player to be nothing more than a gimmick. It has mode for pop, rock, jazz, classical, flat, bass and vocal but I usually leave it on flat. The bass setting is ever so slightly noticeable. Invest in a pair of headphones with good bass output instead. There is a setting to tune the equalizer as well.

Storage
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The amount of songs you can store on the internal memory really depends on the format you store on it. The following figures are based on the 128MB model of the FL100 which is the one I own.

A music track stored as MP3 at 128kbps equates to roughly about 3-4MB a file so 128MB will store about 32-42 tracks (about 3/4 albums). Lowering or raising the bitrate (kbps) will obviosuly mean more or less stored tracks. I tend to find with MP3's 128kbps is more than adequete but some audiophiles may want to go for 192kbps.

Using the Windows Media Audio (WMA) file sizes can be as small as 2MB for a track encoded at 64kpbs. Confusingly, WMA 64Kbps is the equivalent of a MP3 stored at 128Kbps so you can roughly the same quality as MP3 but only have the size! All of a sudden, the player can hold up to 80 tracks or 8 albums, once again depending on encoding and filesize.

Add a 256MB SD or MMC card and the player will have 384MB of combined storage allowing for up to 120 MP3 tracks (12 Albums) or 240 WMA tracks (24 albums). Unless you are a die hard iPod fan and want to store your entire music collection on one portable device, the potential to have 24 albums without changing discs/cassettes should be enough to get you by a long train/tube journey.

Navigation
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The menu system is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Although it won’t trouble techie’s, from a consumer’s point of view, it can get a little bit confusing and sometimes border on annoying. Turning the player on or off is easy enough from the button on the fascia and navigating from track to track is easy enough using the jog dial. What I find bizarre is the way the jog dial operates in one direction (left for rewind, right for forward) and then the volume control next to it goes in the opposite direction (left for volume up, right for volume down). After months of ownership, this still catches me out from time to time. Although there is a useful feature to navigate to another track whilst listening to your current selection, I can’t help but think its too many clicks and too cumbersome to use. There are some useful feature such as a study mode to repeat sections of track (which is useful for studying languages for instance) but setting them up to do it is a rather laborious task.

Recording
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The FL100 also has a recording feature. A quick tap on the small round record button on the front of the fascia and you can use it as a Dictaphone although it was not good as hiding background noise. Due to the small in built microphone, recording from a long distance is not realistic and given it only records in a low 33kbps, only voice recording are worth it. How much you want to record is up to how much free memory you have left. The recordings are stored as WAV files in the player’s internal memory which can then be transferred to your home computer.

Expansion
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An advantage of the FL100 is that you can add extra memory via a SD/MMC card slot although the player will only (officially) take up to 25BMB cards. Not a lot of other solid state players have this feature so it’s good to know you can add more capacity when you need to. Whilst the rest of the body is encased the in metal, the flap to open the storage compartment for the SD/MMC card slot is somewhat flimsy, a cheap looking bit of plastic sprayed in silver, which really does not go with the rest of the build quality of the FL100. The battery compartment has the same problem.

Battery Life
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The FL100 uses just one AAA battery and this can last up to 11 hours (manufacturers claim) but it all depends on how you use the player. For example, the blue backlight on the display will drain the life considerably, and playing the radio will use more battery as the device needs to use the power to amplify the signal. Having used a range of batteries on the device from cheap batteries to Duracell’s, I can say that realistically you are looking about 8-10 hours of play time from one AAA battery. Playing from SD/MMC cards, it’s more likely to be 7 hours as it uses more power to read from the card. So in terms of battery life, this player is not great. Travelling to work 5 days a week, 1 hour each way, I have managed to get through 1 battery every week. The player will take rechargables so it’s an idea to invest in a set of rechargeable AAAs instead of forking out for a set of batteries every month.

Interface
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One of the main drawbacks of the player is the USB support. The FL100 only supports USB 1.1 which is outdated and slow at transferring information. The latest standard is USB2 which transfers information 40 times faster than USB 1.1. So transferring information to the FL100 internal memory is not speedy at all (it takes 4 ½ minute to fill 128MB) and to makes matter worse, the player is not recognised as a external storage device within Windows 2000 or XP. The only way to get music (or even files) to the FL100 is via its own proprietary software MPIO Manager. Its easy enough to use (although slow via the USB1.1 connection) but considering most solid state players act as removable storage drives for data purposes, this is a gross oversight on behalf of MPIO. If you are going to use SD/MMC cards with this device, my advice would be invest in a USB2 card reader to transfer your music to the card, its simply much quicker.

Other Details
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A leather pouch is supplied with the player, which is welcomed but the case is almost too tight for the FL100 and can hinder operation of the buttons. The manual is written in very suspect Korean English though it will get you by. I liked the fact that they even included one AAA Duracell battery instead of the usual cheap battery attributed with many cheap Taiwanese/Korean brand electronics.

Conclusion
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So given I had the chance to buy this player again, would I buy it? Maybe. There are things I like about the player like its size, its expansion slot and its extensive range of features. On paper it sounds impressive but using the player on a day to day basis, it is a bit of a fiddly device to use. If you just want to be able to playback music with simple operation and ease of use, you will get by, but try using any of the more advanced feature and you be fighting against the fiddly interface. The speed of getting music to the device is also a major minus point for me. If it had a USB2 interface, this would have been a lot easier to use. It’s a shame really as the player looks stylish, sounds good and is well built. The inclusion of an expansion slot set it aside from similarly priced rivals but it may be not enough to overlook the cumbersome interface. In an already overcrowded portable digital music player market, the limitations of the FL100 is its biggest downfall. If I was on the market for one right now, I would certainly check out the newer products before comitting to the MPIO FL100. As always do your research first!

Pricing of the MPIO is currently around £99 for the 128MB version and £129 for the 256MB version (Source: http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk). On ebay you may find sellers selling it for far cheaper.

EXTRA INFO: There is a Yahoo Group dedicated to MPIO players including the FL100 at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MPIO/

(C) 2004 Ray Liu
 

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