Rio Cali user reviews (256MB)

Pros Holds Music

Cons Worst Design, they don't make a different type of arm band to even offer options. Customer Service is bad as well.

Pros expandable memory slot and basic functions- great for all you runners.

Cons sometimes skips when jogging on seriously rough terrain

Summary Had this MP3 Player for well over a year and use it for jogging. Works as good today as it did the first day I bought it, even ran in serious rain storms with it. expandable memory so I have several little cards with different collections on them and can grab one and go. It's cheap at Walmart Warehouse online.

Pros good camoflauge

Cons Oh my god i don't think i have enough time to list them, but let me just bpoint out the main one..."upgrader" bug...

Summary Wow is this thing a piece of **** how could you put a product this f@cken useless on the market, I think i got this upgrader bug maybe 15 times, an i managed to fix it 14 times, by downloading the firmware now i can't even do that anymore as this ballsack licken product has now become a 150$ paper weight.In closing f@ck you rio you can eat me, an to anyone looking to buy this product just don't do it stay away from rio period.

Pros Headphone jack on bottom, fairly water resistant

Cons Not durable, broke easily

Summary Before this I owned one of the first Rio models, which had a headphone jack on top. I use my mp3 player(s) daily for the gym (weight training) and running outside. Sweat got into the headphone jack and the display of the original Rio, and the player wasn't worth much after that. The Cali is an improvement over that design. The jack is on bottom and the electronics are enclosed in plastic/rubber which kept fluid out for the time I used it (~1.5 years).

The downside is that this thing is not designed to be as tough as it needs to be for sport use. The tiny plastic piece that holds the battery door closed cracked on the first drop. This left a gap in the battery door, which wasn't a huge problem (minor annoyance). Then I dropped it again. The volume down button (on top the player) didn't work after that. I took it apart and found the volume down button was a tiny switch held in place _only_ by solder, nothing more sturdy (this is true of the volume up button, power button, and hold switch also). The hold switch and power button seemed to be more impact resistant b/c they are flush with the player surface.

I do not recommend taking your player apart since the way things are glued together caused me to rip the packaging off a microchip (the glue rio applied must have been stronger than the glue which held this microchip's package together).

For those interested it appeared to have a sigmatel microcontroller and 2 samsung flash memory modules. I ripped the packaging off another (small) chip, so I can't comment on that component. Of course, the player is completely dead now b/c of it.

The software is terrible. I believe it's called Rio Taxi. It's extremely slow (due to user interface, not download speed) to put a bunch of songs onto the player. It doesn't handle dealing with lots of music very well (keeps doing this "scan" which brings my laptop to a grinding halt), and the way it looses focus after you move a song up or down in the play order is sure to drive you nuts.

I'm currently in the market for a new, _durable_ sport mp3 player, and I won't get a Rio Cali again, so my recommendation is that you don't either.

I gave this player a "poor" rating as it did not perform well in the area it was designed for, namely sport. I'm sure it would be fine for non-sport use.