Functional, but horribly designed
Pros:
Plays MP3s; shiny; probably won't explode
Cons:
Poor design increases likelihood of crashing during use by approximately 6,489.932%
The Bottom Line:
Don't buy this product. Deal with your CD player until you can save up enough money to buy something that wasn't designed by someone who hates humanity.
|
|
Overall Rating:
|
 |
|
Author's Review
I recommend against buying this. Find something that's more usable than a rabid lemur instead. Maybe try Krazy-Gluing your iPod to the dashboard.
This car media player fulfills all functional requirements listed on the box I purchased it in, but only to the thinnest possible extent.
The display is cluttered and poorly laid out. There are some useless equalizer bars on the side and a bunch of emblems for "MP3", "WMA", "BRB", "LOL" etc. that take up valuable real estate on the panel which could be used instead by the LCD. The LCD itself squeezes anything it has to say into 8 or 9 character spaces.
MP3 support is there, but disappointing. You can't search or sort by ID3 tags, and when you search by Folder, all folder names are cut off at 6 letters. That's right, just like computers in 1990 worked. "Power Supply" becomes "POWERS". All they'd need to do is add ~1 t the end, and I'd be in the siezure-like throes of DOS nostalgia. (DOStalgia, if you will. You won't? Very well, read on. This will go on your record, though.)
If you organize your music folders by Artist/Album, you'd better know the names of all the albums, because it doesn't display folders that don't directly contain any MP3s. I reiterate: There's no way to tell it "Play this artist." It can ONLY organize play via the folders you put on your CD or flash memory. Sorting by song is right out.
The rest of the interface is shaky at best. To activate "Sort by Folder" mode, you have to press the aptly named "S/PF" button (?!) four times (?!?!). Pressing it once or twice lets you choose a song to play based on song number.
SO, if you want to impress your date by instantly playing "Unforgiven II" by Metallica, and have thirty albums on your flash memory, all you need to do is remember that it's the ninth song on the twelfth album with an average song count per album of about 10 so I guess that's like what 183? I dunno; press S/PF twice, dial to 1, press the SEL/VOL knob in, dial to 8, press the SEL/VOL knob again, dial to 3, press the SEL/VOL knob a third time, and it will start playing 5 seconds into the MP3 for no readily apparent reason oh god wait this is actually Duran Duran DON'T JUDGE ME HEY GET BACK IN THE CAR, BABY! Then maybe you get hit by a bus. Truly, we are in the future.
Similar problems plague pretty much every other feature on the player. The ID3 tag displayer scrolls R-E-A-L-L-Y-S-L-O-W-L-Y, and there's no way to set the clock as the default display. But gosh, those bouncing equalizer bars sure look nifty.
Also, it doesn't play OGGs, which increasingly bugs me in consumer media players.
