- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 177 reviews Back to product review
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16 out of 16 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Way better than 30 GB Ipod w/video"
Pros: Great video, easy to use, versatile
Cons: No cradle, no record feature
Summary: Got my Toshiba S30 (30 GB w/video) on friday and it is awesome! (They also have a 60GB version) Retail - $299 and $399 respectively.
Very small - i think it is a tad smaller and lighter than the Ipod counterpart.
Video looks great. I believe when my brother bought his Ipod he was searching for a way to convert to .M4V (only video Ipod will take as far as I know). The S30 uses Windows Media Player 10/11beta to transfer all music and video - and it automatically converted .mpg and .wmv files right before it made the transfer. Transferred a full length movie and it looks great! (Be prepared to wait a while to do this)
Toshiba's own software ofr the last model was awful. But I learned to tag, organize, and convert my library pretty easily with WMP. Transfers are really fast (USB 2.0 speed) and you can transfer and set up the next tranfer at the same time.
Menus are pretty easy to navigate in both the S30 and WMP 11.
I chcked out the VIDEO OUT option. It comes with a cable that plugs into the player's mic jack on one end and has RCA jacks (vid, audio L, and audio R) on the other. Not hi-res on the TV, but definitely watchable. It probably outputs the same resolution that the player has - 340X270 or so. I think that's roughly VHS quality.
1 small feature that was not on my Toshiba 10 GB. When you load a playlist (or create one on the player), you can listen to it in order or on random.
S30 comes with a USB cable that allows you to hook up a USB device (meant for digital cameras) which backs up the content of the device on to the S30. This way if you fill up your camera on vacation, you can dump it and save it.
EQ settings - there are 6 or 8 (rock, pop, jazz, etc). No individual settings for bass/treble.
Here's a big one - the songs seem to be residing on the player as MP3's (the old model converted them into some unusable, encrypted, proprietary format). I have not tested it, but I believe that I can dump the contents of the player on to any machine. None of the modern hard drive based MP3 players can do this as far as I know.
And then there's little things - you can actually partition the drive to set aside space for backups.
Some reviews have dubbed this thing an Ipod killer. Apple has a death grip on the market, so I doubt that will happen. But I think the S30 honestly blows away the Ipod 30. It's just so much more versatile and has so many extras.
- 1 reply to this review
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Philr420 said: "Here's a big one - the songs seem to be residing on the player as MP3's (the old model converted them into some unusable, encrypted, proprietary format). I have not tested it, but I believe that I can dump the contents of the player on to any machine. None of the modern hard drive based MP3 players can do this as far as I know. "
I've had my Archos Gmini400 for a year now, and i've been able to take any songs, videos, pictures from my player and dump them onto another machine with no problems. It basically serves as a portable hard drive in addition to being a video and music player. I'm fairly sure that other players operate in a similar way.
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