Review: Great battery life (I've had over 30 hours from a single rechargeable AA battery), good sound quality, lots of storage on replaceable disks, reasonable size, and a low price compared to HDD players. That's what makes it worth owning - I use mine every day.
The lack of a backlight on the display is a pain - if they'd included a backlit remote that would have resolved the problem, but they haven't so either you have to buy a remote or put up with this. There's no ability to set up proper playlists - they're played either randomly or in the order they're on the disk. That said, given the capacity of the disks, and the fact you can just swap them over, you can put together a playlist on a disk, and swap with another disk if you want to play something else, so it's not too major an issue.
Navigation is functional if not high-powered.
The big, big, big annoyance with the Hi-MD players as a whole is that they don't play MP3s. You either record from the Line In, or use the crappy SonicStage software to transfer music onto the player. You can't even transfer the tracks off again, and although it can act as a mass storage device for transfering data and other files, this doesn't help in putting music on, as that has to be done using SonicStage (it's put in a single, special file).I think if they'd made it support MP3s or at least playing music back from the file system, rather than forcing you to use an under-developed proprietary transfer program, then it would have got 5 stars. That's what loses the 5th star for me. Once you've gone through the hassle of putting your music on there, though, it sounds good, and the positive aspects of the player shine through. I wonder how many iPod owners can even imagine a) playing music non-stop for 27+ hours, and b) just swapping for another rechargeable AA battery when it does run out of juice. |
Audio HiFi
