- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 8 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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5 out of 5 people found this review helpful
2.0 stars
"Good, if you want to "act" cool; Bad if you want to use it."
Pros: Feature packed, really small, good quality reproduction, "cute"
Cons: Really small, uncomfotable earphones, lack of standalone charger, difficult navigation, bad battery life, software glitches, repeated hang-ups, system hangs
Summary: I am an audiophile. I play the classical guitar and am a composer. I have 30+ gigs worth of music and I love my local jazz channel. Hence, the only thing that is stopping me from going for the 60GB iPod is that absence of an FM player. I thought I waited too long (>1.5 years) for THE mp3 player and decided that since my commutes to work were execeding 2 hours every day, I should invest in an interim Flash based mp3 player.
I wanted a player that could sort playlists, play FM and have a good sound output. I have been scouring and reading reviews patiently for more than a few months. When I chanced up on the MobiBlue DAH-1500i, I thought I had found a good candidate.
I got my hands on it yeseterday and tonite I intend to return it back to the store. OK! where did it go wrong?
It was great to open the package and hold the gizmo in your palm. Trust me, this is where the euphoria ends. For starters, you open the manual and read the preface. I am the kind of guy who respects washing instructions and safety precautions. so when I saw the line "Unit may set on fire when charging time exceeds recommended time", I panicked. I dutifully set a countdown timer for 3 hours (which is what they recommended for the first use) and plugged the USB port into it. Here is the deal - YOU NEED TO HAVE A COMPUTER TURNED ON TO CHARGE THE THING. This is different and weird. Luckily, I use my laptop for more than 8 hours a day and that was not going to be a problem had the thing had other Easter eggs to offer.
After forcing the jack in, my comptur recognized it as a mass storage device. No problem. The OLED (pretty nifty) lit up and welcomed me. The charging instructions page says - "DO NOT CHARGE WITH THE OLED TURNED ON". (Else the 911 fire routine). For the love of God, I couldnt find out how to turn the OLED off. Turns out later, that when you jack the thing in2 ur USB, the OLED stays ON. Hello! I speak no Korean! And get a translator!!
I brushed aside these inconveniences, still hoping I will be blown away by the sound and drop a few hundred iPod toting geeks with this. I jacked in the earphones that were provided and after a few uncomfortable squirms, it stood in place. But, the makers had the ramps of Paris in mind when they made these earphones. YOU HAVE TO WEAR IT LIKE A NECKLACE. there is no two ways about it. The damn thing has to hang from around your neck. I dont like jewlery and I wanted to conceal this in my pocket, as I usually like to do. But NO! the wires wont let you do so. Frustrated, I threw the earphones aside and picked up my Senheisser HD457, jacked it in and biked off.
I threw in some Trance, Indian Classical and Deep Forest just to feel the range. There is a SRS system with some proprietary WOW technology. It works fine! I liked the bass, sometimes. There was a 3D effect and I finally thought I was getting some returns. I wanted to try to listen to FM and after some cumbersome maneuvering, I got it to tune automatically. But Alas! my 107.3 jazz channel was skipped. I could manually locate it, but I was at the mercy of equilibrium. I could pick up the signal only when I stood in a particular pose. Enter the manual. I read a line that said "THE EARPHONES ALSO WORK AS FM RECEIVERS". Now they tell me!!!!
Still, I thought I could live with it. Hey! It costed me just 99$ (+tax+s/h) I shouldnt complain. I looked down at the battery and saw it was almost running dry! Holy Smokes! Cnet said 7 hours.The manual said 10 hours. But I was hitting 3. I recheck the manual and the Golden fine print - "IF THE SOUND < 20; IF the OLED IS OFF;IF THE MP3 is @ xyz bitrate". By now, it was getting on my nerves. The buttons seemed a bit too hard to press and required my fingernails.
I came to work, charged it again and tried to throw in some more files and I got "DISK FULL". I checked the existing file capacity and the size of the folder I wanted to throw and it just didnt add up. 300 MB remaining could surely take a 98MB folder. But no! Solution - Format the disk. It started to work fine, but my mind was already debating whether to use google or mapquest to find the nearest Walmart.
The coup-de-grace came during lunch. The unit is designed to shut itself off if you do nothing with it for 5minutes when the player has been stopped. Someone needs to tell the programmer in Korea that listening to FM very much satisfies the above condition. The result - the unit SHUT DOWN - not switched off, but shut itself down. I could resuscitate it. Solution - jack the USB for a second and remove it. SOmehting makes it reset itself. I gave it one more try in the above procedure with the same result. That is when I packed the thing neatly back into the box, chose google for the map and printed the directions. IT IS GOING BACK.
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