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3.0 stars
"Good Hardware, Sucky Software"
Pros: Hardware design is excellent
Cons: Software, including use of WinAmp playists, makes this an unusable appliance
Summary: I don't know how this works for pop music, but for adult fare like classical music, audio books, lectures, etc., it stinks.
Even with the 1.60 firmware update, it can't remember what you were last listening to -- it constantly reverts to the first set of German language lectures I stored on it.
It doesn't seem to understand the WinAmp playlists -- it won't advance from one lecture to the next automatically but instead plays the current one in an endless loop until you manually move it. Then when you shut it down, it forgets where it was. I got so sick of the German language lessons that I erased them -- then it reverted to the next set of lectures I recorded as its "default" material
If you eliminate breaks in material to avoid the playlist problem, you get a large chunk of material with V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W hardware fastforwarding and reversing. It takes forever to fastforward to the point in a section of lecture or music you last listened too -- my old CD player moves about 4-5 times as fast. It also remembered what I was last listening to so that I didn't often have to use the fast forward.
The FM radio is pretty good, and the storage capacity is nice -- but its a lot of money to spend for a 20GB supplementary drive with FM radio! Unfortunately, it was such a poorly selling item compared to the iPod that there aren't any useful add-ons, like a way to directly transfer your digital photos to it.
All-in-all, I think the software makes this appliance unusable. I mean a hard drive player that's slower and stupider than a CD player! No wonder they discontinued it.
The included earbuds aren't much. I use a Shure E3c set which has a nice, neutral sound for audio -- no bass bias, thank you.
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