Customer Reviews
Great value for the money 
2006-03-16
I wanted an mp3 player but couldn't afford a larger storage one now. I was going to get the 256 MB, but this blue 512MB was only $10 more so I upgraded. It's nice for a starter, very small size to fit in your pocket. You can organize songs in folders before you upload them. You can't creat playlists, though, and it seems to me when you shuffle the songs, it shuffles all saved on the device, not just the folder you selected, at least when you go to skip a song. The headphones are kinda goofy but seem to have good sound. It plugs directly into the USB like other flash devices. I'm overall satisfied with it, esp. for the money I paid.
Decent MP3 player with one serious exception 2006-02-01
The unit itself is pretty good. I got it in yesterday and have been using it all day today. The battery life is pretty decent and the controls are reasonable once you get used to them, especially considering there's only a few control buttons. The sound quality is decent, but I would suggest you get a different set of headphones. For one thing the headphones they ship with have a cord you can put around your neck. It's actually a pretty useful idea so that the player doesn't fall out a shirt pocket and get damaged, but the cord is too small and cumbersome. I find it better to use my other headphones with the longer cable and just stick it in a pants or jacket pocket where it won't fall out.
The serious problem however, is that the player has issues with MP3's encoded in VBR or Variable Bit Rate. So if you have a file encoded in say 320Kbps, you're fine, but if it's encoded in near-CD VBR it won't play at all. The catch is that unless you encoded the file yourself, you won't really know if it works until you try to play the file. Yes there are ways you can check the bitrate of the file before you put it on the drive, but if you have a number of music files, or podcasts (www.podshow.com) you won't want to manaully check and/or re-encode each one.
If you want something with decent space at a decent price, it's a good drive. By comparison a 512 MB iPod shuffle will likely cost twice as much, but that issues with the VBR files is a pretty big issue.
