Rating:

The build quality is not what you’d expect from a $400 piece of equipment. The buttons are cheap looking. And there is a lot of problem with the navigation button that rocks up and down.

The menus look like something from the 80s. Big unattractive icons. You’d have to do a lot guessing as to what each icon does.

There is no software that comes with it. Just plug it into your USB port and it shows up as a drive. Just drag and drop. Though it maybe simple, but it really needs to be more elegant than this.

The unit is also heavy, bulky and highly unattractive.

Rating:

I don’t care much a bout the slow start. So, it takes a few moments to boot. So does a PC. So what?

What I DO care about is wether it can do the job or not, and it is sadly lacking it it’s ABILITY to play back video. Come on! The screen jerks twice per second no matter what you play back and that just gives me a headache, and I normally don’t get headaches. I can’t take 5 minues, and with a recoding time of 150 hours, I really don’t want ot go there. Video output to a larger screen is the same.

Many are used to jerky video from the internet, but that is more or less ramdom jerks. This does it at 2hz, yes, twice per second and it won’t stop. I loaded the video files onto my PC and they play back fine. I suspect the unit just does not have the necessary horsepower to decode the MP4 files (AVI extension) AND render video smoothly at the same time. The video I am talking about was recorded BY THE UNIT, so it should at least be able to play back smoothly. Alas, no. I wasted $300 on the thing, please don’t make the same mistake.

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to view pictures or listen to music, it can do what they say it does, but overall you’re better off with a stack of discs and a portable DVD player, or even a laptop Pc with an optical drive.

My advice is to not buy any PMP unless you can see it working. In the end, it’s how it works that you should care about.

I read so many reviews before buying and NOBODY mentioned the choppy video. I hope that this helps even one person out there to avoid this piece of dung.

One thing I wanted to know that nobody said anything specific about was could I use a flash drive to play video off of? The answer is “no”. What it does is load the files from the flash drive (or other USB storage device) and let you play it from the built-in HD. Othersie, it works well as a 40 gig USB drive for a PC, and that is what I’ll be using it for, if at all. Now I need to find a GOOD video player. Let me know if you find one!