Player Opinions

Continued from Janus Dissected….

Audiovox/UTStarcom SMT5600

Pros:
1) One heck of a phone; outstanding feature set. This gizmo justifies a blog post all it's own (which I will do, soon); right now I'll focus on the audio-related tasks.
2) Automatically switches to 'headset' profile when I plug in headphones, and switches back (to 'silent', for example) when I unplug them.
3) Sounds great, plenty of volume capability.
4) Small and lightweight; the equal of the two other devices I tested (which are only audio players).
5) Long battery life (solid-state storage, instead of a rotating HDD, helps!).
6) Extremely fast 3-second track-to-track and forward-and-reverse track latencies. Unclear how much of this is due to the 200 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP processor inside, versus DRM algorithm optimizations, versus the interface to a four-pin flash memory card (instead of a 3600 RPM serial interface HDD), versus the fewer number of stored tracks as compared to the other two players I tested.
7) Stunning color display.
Tracks can be stored to either internal memory or a removable miniSD card.
9) Charges over the USB connection.

Cons:
1) Capacity-limited. 256 MByte miniSD cards are currently the largest removable modules in high volume production. That's 2-3 single-disc albums' worth of music at 192 kbps. Internal RAM is 32 MBytes, and is consumed by installed programs, temporary data for those programs, etc. Internal flash memory is 64 MBytes, of which only 28.5 MBytes are available for audio track storage.
2) Very slow downloads to the phone from a PC; greater than five minutes per album.
3) Navigation Pad is somewhat difficult to use; it's easy to activate the center Action button instead of a right or left scroll, for example.
4) Regardless of whether you store tracks to internal memory or a miniSD card, license files get stored to internal memory. This approach consumes comparatively scarce internal memory capacity, and it also makes the DRM'd content stored on a miniSD card non-portable to other players unless they also contain the necessary license files.
5) The included Windows Media Player doesn't offer any audio processing capabilities (eq, crossfading, bass boost, surround virtualization, etc). PocketMind's PocketMusic Player includes these types of functions and also supports an expanded set of audio codecs, but it doesn't seem to be able to handle DRM'd WMA files.

Creative Labs Zen Micro

Note: normally, I wouldn't review a product with a clearly labeled 'beta' firmware, because my experiences wouldn't necessarily replicate those of a user with a subsequent 'gold' firmware release. However, my opinion of the iRiver H10 was so sub-par (keep reading) that I decided to give the Zen Micro a spin for another perspective.

Pros:
1) Easy-to-read monochrome display
2) Simple, intuitive user interface navigation.
3) Small, lightweight, and comes in multiple colors (mine's bright red with a white border, and my wife thinks it's 'cute').
4) Excellent sound quality. More than sufficient volume capability.
5) 5 GByte capacity holds a lot of music, even encoded at 192 kbps.
6) If I let tracks play through to the end, the track-to-track switching time is instantaneous. Particularly desireable when tracks are supposed to flow together (such as with multi-track live concert recordings).
7) Offers several audio processing options via equalization and Smart Volume algorithms (see here for more information on these).
Downloads over the USB2 interface are quite speedy; a minute or so per album, and the Zen Micro also charges over the USB2 connection.
9) Supports microphone recording and FM radio (including recording) functions, neither of which I've tried out.
10) Supports synchronization of calendar, contacts and tasks from Outlook; again I didn't try this out first-hand.

Cons:
1) I encountered a few freezups, spontaneous library rebuilds and other functional glitches. But remember, folks, it's beta firmware.
2) Battery life, at around 9 hours, was less than the 12 hours claimed. Incremental audio enhancement and DRM processing algorithms, not required in all cases, may account for the discrepency.
3) There was an approximately 10 second delay when manually advancing to the next track (when I hadn't played far enough into the existing track) and when back-stepping to the previous track. My theory here is that the TI DSP inside the Zen Micro is, with whatever spare MIPS are left over after per-frame decoding and processing the current track, simultaneously decrypting and validating the DRM on the next track in the playlist.
4) Touchpad controls were, for my tastes, overly sensitive in their default configuration (but are user-adjustable).
5) Software driver installation required prior to use. This is only a temporary situation, until MTP (Media Transfer Protocol)-aware firmware is included with the player out-of-box. My Zen Micro came with a v1 firmware release, and I needed to upgrade it to a v2 beta rev so it would be Janus DRM-compatible….necessitating a beforehand installation of the drivers.

Continued with Player Part Two….