Good for Minimal Usage, but Quirks Abound
Written: Jan 17 '05
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Pros: Lightweight and nice headphone buds.
Cons: Cannot specify song order, some tracks get transferred, but don't play.
The Bottom Line: For lightweight workout music, this device is perfectly acceptable. But if you have more serious needs, you might want to really consider an iPod style device.
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| konky2000's Full Review: Creative Technology Rhomba (256 MB) MP3 Player |
I do not have very demanding needs for a portable MP3 player. The only time I am in a position to need something like this is the 40 minutes a day I am at the gym.
For this basic need, the Creative Rhomba is perfectly acceptable. There are some basic problems with the device, however, that prevent me from recommending the device if you have any more demanding needs than I do.
Since so many before me complained about the device's firmware, the first thing I did upon getting my player was to update the firmware. I have done similar updates with other devices, and I must say that Creative has done a good job making this update as painless a process as possible.
Once updated I set about trying the device out.
The device has an FM tuner, a voice recorder, and most importantly it can play MP3, or WMA music files that have been transferred to it via a USB cable.
I suppose if I had some sort of emergency reason to record my voice, the voice recorder might be helpful, but really, this is a very unnecessary feature and I wouldn't even think about using it outside of emergencies.
I got fairly good reception with the FM tuner, and it was nice to have a digital tuner. However, I rarely listen to the radio, so I can't say I tested the device fully on this measure. If you are looking for an FM radio, however, I would go with something built more specifically for that task.
With those two aspects out of the way, then I will focus my attention on the digital music capabilities of the device.
I have a PC and am using the free version of Realplayer 10 to manage my music files. Realplayer has a nice feature which allows me to plug in a portable device and then I can synchronize my device with a Realplayer playlist. After a couple months of using different methods, this is the way I have decided to get music onto and off of the device.
There are other methods, however. Once you plug the device in, you can open it up as a disk drive in Windows Explorer. I was then able to simply drag music files on my computer to the Rhomba until it was full. Using this method caused quite a few problems with music files I purchased off of various internet sites like iTunes. Even when a file was a WMA file, and even when the file was dragged into my device's harddrive, the song would not play when I tried to listen to it. Even worse, sometimes when my player would get to these manually transferred files, the whole device would crash and I would be required to manually turn off the device and start it up again to start playing it again.
Because of these quirks I have settled on using Realplayer as my only method of tranferring files. Although, I still have problems where a file I transfer causes the player to freeze, it happens rarely enough, that I'm not stressing too hard.
The worst problem of all with this device, however, is that there is no way to pre-determine what order the tracks appear once they are transferred to the device. While the song order on the device is similar to the order of songs on the playlist I set up in Realplayer, songs are strangely out of order here and there. Basically I have had to resign myself to the fact that the song order on my device will be close to, but not exactly what I tried to set up on my computer.
Like I said, this is OK for my very limited usage of the device, but if I was planning on using this device for hours a day, I'm not sure I could live with the randomness of the song order.
As far as charging, the device is great. Every time you plug it into the USB port, it begins to charge the batteries. Since I plug it in every few days, I almost never dip below 80% battery life.
Unfortunately, I would not be able to take this on a trip unless I was sure to have a USB enabled computer with me. This is yet another major problem that prevents me from recommending this as a serious MP3 player.
I got mine as a gift, and for my minimal usage, it suits my purposes very well. But the quirkiness of little things here and there DO effect my overall enjoyment of it. After using the Rhomba for the past 3 months, I certainly understand why people spend more for the iPod. If the iPod is a major league MP3 player, the Creative Rhomba is barely making the cut in little league.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 120
Recommended for: Athletes - Lightweight and Portable, Perfect for the Gym
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Epinions.com ID:
konky2000
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Member: Konky Two Thousand
Location: Oakland, CA
Reviews written: 66
Trusted by: 6 members
About Me:
30 year old web designer living in Oakland, CA
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