Just a few days ago I mentioned a cheap MP3 / SD card reader here. I went ahead and bought one to review and it arrived just the other day. The unit itself is a plastic / rubber texture with flexible buttons.
In the box there’s a set of funky-looking headphones with a clippy thing to hold them onto your clothing easily. There’s also a loop so that – I presume – you can hang these around your kneck easily without losing them.
The box also contains a small drivers CD – this isn’t needed on XP and above. There’s also a cable to plug the MP3 player / card reader into your PC. It’s the same cable as you’ll get with many Smartphones and Pocket PC’s, so you don’t have to worry too much if you lose it. There’s also a free AAA battery in the box plus a rather “interesting” manual which I’ll back to in a moment.
On the edges there’s a standard 3.5mm audio plug and the Mini USB jack as shown…
The SD card slot is also on the side..
As a data card reader this doesn’t win any competitions for speed. The manual won’t win any awards either. It’s written in what I call “Chenglish”..
As an example, the manual here says, “When press “\Play” button, blue light will flicker”. However on mine it was red, and blue only lit up when I was transferring files to and from the SD card. I had a few problems with some MP3 files too – I uploaded just one to test it and for some reason it ignored it completely, however when I uploaded an album it worked fine – I simply held down the play / pause button to turn it on and away it went.
It’s cheap, so you don’t get a screen to see which file you’re on. There’s no graphic equalizer either, and to be honest the bass response through the supplied headphones isn’t as good as it could be. I swapped these for my on headphones and things improved quite a bit.
As a cheap MP3 player though this is quite good. Just shove in a decent SD card, transfer the files and you’re done.
The cost? Well, it’s just £7.04 from Savastore.com, or £5.86 here at hitech2go.com). The thing that appealed to me here is the fact that you’re actually not restricted to the standard on-board 64Mb, 128Mb or 256Mb memory that you’d normally find on other cheap MP3 players. This lets you slot in an SD / MMC card (have a look at MobyMemory for some cheap cards) and play your own tunes straight away. It’s tiny too, so if you’re out jogging it’s easy to hide.
Links – Savastore.com — HiTech2go.com — MobyMemory