Toshiba Gigabeat S MES60VK (60GB, black)

Pros: User Interface is one of the easiest to use, more colorful than the ipod, great sound and volume, album art shown on various menus, sleek and sexy design, back is very durable, extremely fast processo

Cons: Horrible video conversion process, radio quality is horrible, Screen abmormalities, no organizartion for movies, TV output equivalent to VHS quality or worse, no recording, no 5-band eq

Summary: I have the TOshiba Gigabeat S60 (60 gig) abour 5 weeks ago and I am proud to say that I am somewhat indifferent to the Toshiba Gigabeat S.

First off, for all those people who claim that the Toshiba Gigabeat is a do-it-all player which can play videos, Id like to say that it is rather an MP3 player rather than a PVP.

The reason being the hassle for video conversion and the video quality. The Toshiba Gigabeat supports WMV ONLY. Even if your video is WMV, the gigabeat will not natively support this video. SO even if your video is in the format of the gigabeat, it will still need to convert it. If you have an avi file which you want to transfer to the gigabeat you might as well get a third party converter since any divx or xvid file converted by WMP 11 will have frame-skipping issues. I downloaded King of Queens xvid video and i needed it to convert to WMV before converting it in WMP 10. In other words you will need to convert xvid and divx videos twice in order to play them on the gigabeat.

Another issue in the gigabeat is video quality. I cant believe no one ever mentioned the crappy viewing angle. Daytime scenes are alright but night-time scenes will constantly cause you to turn your gigabeat around. Color abnormalities also occur during dark scenes. Because of the gigabeat's 62K color screen it lacks the ability to smoothly display transitions of color in dark areas. Therefore color does not correctly blend in the darkness.

I will not mention the audio portion of this player, because i thought it was perfect. Clean, fast interface and 95db of sound which allows it to get really loud without distorting sound. It displays album art next to album list and can show it full screen. If you want to break away from apple mundane interface gigabeat is for you.

However, radio is a useless feature to the gigabeat. Not only can you not record radio, but the quality is garbage as well. I am not joking when i say the quality is equivalent to a manual tuner radio. There is so much static on the radio that it makes listening to the radio unbearable. And this is just outside, its worse inside.

My gigabeat was sort of messed up as well. It constantly froze up and said the gigabeat was out of battery and about to turn off, and this was after a full night charge. In addition to this when i tried to sync videos it would always get stuck converting at 0%. Then all of these error messages would show up.


Bottom Line: I would recomend the gigabeat if your main purpose was to listen to music although the battery life is only 12 hours. If you want to watch videos and play music as well, this device is not for you. Its horrible video quality and lack of native video support makes it a hassle to play videos. It took me an hour to transfer one 20 min video and i have a duo core processor. For all you video fans I would recommend the Creative Zen Vision: M which has native support for AVI, WMV, Mpeg 1,2,4, DivX 4,5, and XVid. THe sound quality is better as well.