30 Minutes of Rockin' Handheld Sound
Written: Oct 21 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Cheap, trendy look, cheap, voice recording, cheap
Cons: Slow and painful songloading, not much space
|
|
|
| mcjester's Full Review: D-link DMP-100 (32 MB) MP3 Player |
While certainly not an award-winner, the D-Link DMP-100 fits the bill of a cheap portable MP3 player. It will keep you satisfied, but not amazed.
With only 32MB memory, it holds roughly a half-hour of 128kbps MP3s, which is the most common type found on Napster, etc. I find this translates into 8 to 10 songs. It puts out very decent sound; while I'm not a fan of the earbuds that come bundled, I use either regular headphones or, while driving, a cassette adaptor that came with a CarDiscman (I believe Rio makes one for around $15). Luckily, most of my drives are short, and I rarely have too little music for one trip.
For those who are tired of accidentally cranking up the volume with a Walkman in the pocket, the DMP-100 comes with a thoughtful "Hold" switch that optionally prevents any unintended button-presses. It can take SmartMedia memory cards, but any size worth getting would cost more than most pay for this player, so that's kind of a moot point.
For such a cheap item, it's surprisingly trendy. It's a little over 3 inches tall by a bit over 2 inches wide by 1/2 inch thick, a great size for the pocket or to hold in the hand. The clear, durable plastic pays homage to the iMac by showing circuitboards beneath, and looks even better than the picture suggests. The buttons have a nice metallic sheen, and the 2 line LCD screen shows elapsed time as well as the beginning of the song name, a useful feature. It's surprisingly rugged, surviving multiple drops onto concrete with nary a skip. The Equalizer is a good attempt at promoting music quality, but it's only a bunch of hyperexaggerated presets which end up worsening things. I question a few functionality decisions by the good folks at D-Link: they devote buttons to arcane features such as "A-B" (with which you can set up a loop of any length within a song, which I find rather useless), yet have no Power button: hold down the play button to turn on, stop button to turn off (with a cute "Good bye" message).
Other fun features include voice recording, which as long as you're speaking into the mic-hole picks up surprisingly well, and stores an impressive 2 hours of voice. You can also store any file on the memory, using the player as a "disk" to transfer files between PCs. Holding down on the Forward or Back buttons for over one second acts as a 5-second fast-forward, convenient for picking up where you left off. A battery level monitor is another thoughtful addition.
The only thing that disappoints me is the difficulty and slowness of getting songs from the PC to the player. The software is a bit fussy, but follows an understandable Windows Explorer-like format, allowing drag-and-drop transferring of MP3s. It downloads throught the Parallel/Printer port at roughly 100k/sec, meaning that it takes about 30 seconds to transfer a 3 minute 128kbps file, and about 5 minutes to fill the whole thing. Acceptable, but always keeps me wondering why they didn't use the much faster and more popular USB format. It's also a pain to configure the computer for 'ECP' support, requiring advanced tampering in the Startup BIOS to get set up...and if you use your printer port for, well, a printer, you'll have to get used to plugging and unplugging cords. But then I remind myself, "Hey, it was cheap, live with it," and then I fix myself a sandwich or something while waiting for the file transfer to finish. Hint: Make sure the player is turned on before downloading.
A few caveats: The manual was obviously written by a non-native English speaker, and also seems to be written for people who already know what they're doing, which is nobody who reads a manual. Also, most deals for this nifty gadget charge around $150, then require mail-in rebates to capture the savings. To D-Link's credit, the rebate came right when promised.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
mcjester
|
|
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Reviews written: 26
Trusted by: 4 members
About Me:
I'm into cooking, travel, technology, languages, and writing.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.