University = No spare time to write, despite an ever decreasing student loan...
University = No spare time to write, despite an ever decreasing student loan...
Member since:31.01.2007
Reviews:22
Members who trust:1
This, isnt a bad little player, its small, light and packs features.
-------SIZE------- First of all, the size, its about 100mm wide, about 30mm deep and about 20mm high. Okay so, for a pendrive its relatively chunky, but for a flash based mp3 player, though not the smallest its not bad. Its unbelievable light, and you don't even notice that you're carrying it half the time. The screen is a good enough size to see what you're listening too and the name of the titles scroll from left to right if they dont fit on the screen.
----------LOGOS---------- You have the ability to customise the player by changing the bootup logo from one of the 12 supplied, it ranges from seasonal events to birthday banners, so theres something for everything. Quite why you'd want them i'm not sure, but its a nice thing to play around with.
----------BUNDLED ACCESSORIES---------- In terms of bundled accessorries its excellent, not only does it come with additional earphone covers that allow you to change the plate from blue to silver, it comes with an extension headphone cable, ideal if you've got deep
pockets, a necklace thing, so you can hang it around your neck and headphones obviously. All of the bundled accessories are good quality, and the headphones are suprisingly comfortable to wear with their clip over the ear fixments. They produce good sound too, though bass is a little undefined. However, the can't quite match the sound of normal neckband headphones.
----------BATTERY LIFE---------- The player runs on one single AAA battery, and you can expect this to last around 10 hours. Which isnt bad, infact its the life of some Hard Disk players. Disadvantages of this, means you can't recharge it. So, if you're making long journeys with it, make sure you have a spare battery to hand.
----------DURABILITY--------- This thing is built to last, because its flashed based there are no moving parts like that of hard disk players (ipod, creative, iriver) which means it wont skip. This means it is ideal for use in the gym or jogging. Due to the fact that there are no moving parts, it means should you accidently drop it, it'll still work 100% fine. I dropped mine a million times, and it was fine. Infact, even if it gets wet this player will survive. I had it in my pocket once when i got pushed into a swimming pool, i thought it was finished for sure, but i was advised to leave it in an airing cupboard for a couple of days. I did this, and it was as good as new! You'll have no problems with breakdowns with this.
----------FM RADIO---------- This is one of few flash based mp3 players that features an fm radio. The radio is of good quality, though i must say when the backlight goes on you can hear a high pitched whine through the headphones. This gets a little tedious. The radio like many mp3 players uses the headphones as an aerial, despite this reception is good.
----------VOICE RECORDER & MICROPHONE---------- Not only does this feature a fm radio, it also has a voice recorder. This is ideal for makeing memos when you're out of the office, or even recording a shopping list on it for example. The player has its own built in microphone which is good for picking up sounds within a range of about 10 metres. If however the inbuilt microphone isnt enough, the player has an additional microphone socket which allows you to plug a microphone into it, near the headphone socket. Unfortunatly I've never tested this out, so i cant give my opinion on it.
----------EASE OF USE---------- Its very simple to use, dedicated volume controlls are located on the side, as is a record button and a quick link to the radio. The scroll wheel can be pushed sharply in either the left or right direction to skip tracks, or held in either direction to fast forward or rewind. To access the menu, you simple press the scroll wheel down, you will now be able to access the backlight, EQ settings, startup settigns, FM radio settings, and the voice recorder. Very simple to operate.
Transferings songs is also easy, due to its flash based nature, the drive appears as a removable disk, so you simply drag the songs you want on the player across too it. This means you don't need any software to help you do this. This makes it easy to take songs around friends houses and copy songs too and from it.
There arent many disadvantages to this player. Perhaps the main one is the capacity.
---------CAPACITY-------- Unfortunatly the capactiy is only 256mb, and flash based drives go up to 2GB or perhaps even 4GB now. As this is only 256mb you can fit around 30 songs on it in normal quality 128kbps, but if you compress them you can get around 80 on there. I have to warn you though, compressed songs played back on this player sound terrible. You really notice the difference in quality.
----------USB 1.1---------- Unfortunatly. the player is USB 1.1, this means that its 40x slower than that of USB 2, so if you're transfering 256mb of data in one go, go away, make a cup of tea and come back, if you're lucky it might be done. If not, go and take a power nap, recharge your batteries. YEs, if you are transfering 256mb in one go, you can expect it to take between 5 and 10 minutes, depending on the speed of your computer. If however, you're only transfering one song, this can take as little as 15-30 seconds. Still slow yes, comapred to USB 2.0.
----------OVERVIEW------------ If its a mp3 player ideal for the gym you're after, this is probably a good one to choose, small, more feature packed than an ipod & lightwieght. You can't really go wrong. If you're looking for something to put your whole music collection onto, this is definatly something you don't want. You'll be better of with one of the hard disk players for that. I would recommend this to people, not solely for its mp3 playing, but for its fm radio and usefull ness as an out of office tool.
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Mar 26th, 2007
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