Grrrr......
Written: Jul 20 '01
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Pros: compact, Fast Transfers
Cons: Battery life, software, "manual", can be difficult to use some functions, unreliability
The Bottom Line: It's not worth it. Save your money (and your) time and get a better player instead.
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| uncle_perry's Full Review: Rio PMP-500 (64 MB) MP3 Player |
After hearing good things about this MP3 player I decided I might aswell get one for myself seeing as I had the money availiable. And the Rio is a very good little device. The battery life could be a bit better, but using only one battery makes it twice as energy efficient than my old Panasonic CD. The software is BAD though, but luckily you can get plugins for RealJukebox to fix that. You can't group tracks by artist or genre or things like that, but you can put them into different folders. It doesnt read ID tags on the MP3 files themselves, it displays the file name, which may get things confusing if your filenaming is a bit sloppy on your PC. The "Manual" that comes with it is a bit on the useless side, if you want to do anything like select an option of make a playlist of some sorts you had have better be prepared to spend a bit of time fiddling about with the Rio alot untill you figure it out.
Overall it IS a good little peice of hardware, but I do not reccomend it for one big reason. Well, actually three big reasons.
After about 2 months, the display became continually distorted on certain tracks, making it impossible to tell what track was playing or to read any of the display. This problem increased untill it would lock up and freeze like a PC running Windows 95. I took it back to shop where I got it and had it replaced. 1 month later. Certain tracks are intransferable from PC to Rio. This was an annoyance but I was willing to deal with it. Untill every track on my PC became intransferable. This problem actually continued untill the "distorted display" problem arose again. So I took it back. They gave me another Rio (than my first choice of my money back). The third worked fine. For about a WEEK. Untill everytime I plugged the lead into the Rio, the device would turn itself off untill I took the lead out. Which made it impossible to transfer any tracks onto it. And with some more distored displays I took it back where the store manager decieded I had suffered enough and gladly gave me my money back.
So, if I had three problems with three different units, I wouldn't recommend them, it's just not worth the trouble.
BTW Where it says "Amount Paid", I actually paid £200 for this, and $286 is what it converts to.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 286
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Epinions.com ID:
uncle_perry
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Member: Chris Fox
Location: Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 1 member
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