I
have one of
these.
Here are the
features from the back of the box, my notes in parentheses:
Here's my
real non-
bullshit info:
The
player itself is very nice, nice
backlit LCD display. You can
bookmark specific places in a
song, good for when you want someone to
listen to a song -
you can
make it go right to the
lyrics if it has a long
instrumental bit at the
start. It can
repeat one track, one
folder, or
everything. The playlist can also be
randomized or
programmed. The
programming is both a
pain in the ass to do and
worthless - you can
easily arrange the
playlist on the
player from your
computer. It
has an
equalizer with
normal,
classic,
jazz,
rock, and
custom settings. The
backlight can be
set to
normal (comes on when you press a button),
always on, and
always off. It has nice
browsing abilities. You press on the
browse button once and you get a list of the
songs in the
current folder, press twice for a list of
folders, and once more for a list of
bookmarks. All the music has to be in
folders, which is rather
stupid as 64 MB isn't enough for you to need to
organize songs this way, and I haven't even been able to
figure out how to create a
folder, except for a single one when I
put the first
music on it.
The
software can be
annoying. The
installer doesn't
install the
drivers needed for it to work, it merely copies them to your
hard disk, you need to
hope Windows will find them and
install them. Choosing which
music to put on the
player is also
annoying. I have to go
into a
dialog, check the boxes next to the
songs I want, and
click add items. Then the
dialog closes and I can
see how much
memory the songs will use up, so then I
go back into the
dialog to add more to fill up the
memory or remove a few to get back under the
limit, close the
dialog again, and click "Copy to portable". It would have been much
simpler to have a list of all songs and a list of songs selected for
transfer side by side, and simply
drag and drop.
All in all, its
good. I
do have an old version of the
software, I am now getting the
new version which is hopefully
better. If you want to buy one yourself, the current
cheapest online retailer I found was
www.centralpcs.com, at $190 + S&H ($8 for
ground) + Tax. There is
currently a $50 rebate
available, you can print out the
form at
amazon.com (it is not
specific to
Amazon, don't worry.)