Worth a little more than what I paid for it
Written: Jul 01 '02 (Updated Jul 01 '02)
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Pros: Incredibly small and light; decent sound; great for audiobooks; easy to flash ROM
Cons: Vulnerable to static electricity; Control ring awkward to use; software suite mediocre; 16mb too small
The Bottom Line: Unless it is under $25, avoid it. These days, you can do much better.
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| robotech_master's Full Review: Rio 600 (32 MB) MP3 Player |
A couple of years ago, Pepsi had a website promotion, "Pepsistuff/Dewstuff," which allowed trading in of access codes from Pepsi bottlecaps for valuable prizes. A 16mb Rio 600 was at the top of the list, requiring about 250 caps. Fortunately for my MP3-listening ambition, my university was a Pepsi campus, and only a few days after I started, I was able to send away for the Rio.
When it came, it included the unit itself, a spandex belt pack, wrap-around earbud headphones, USB sync cable, and a CDROM containing software and the instruction book.
Right away, I was impressed by its small size--just a bit larger than a Zippo cigarette lighter. Unlike the cassette walkman that I had carried around for years, I could clip it onto my belt and forget I was wearing anything at all. Even when I downsampled music to 32 kilobits per second (as I had to in order to fit an album into 16 megabytes of RAM), it still sounded pretty decent, and had a good selection of tone presets as well as manual treble and bass sliders. It was also quite easy to upgrade the flash ROM, as I did twice while I owned the machine--it was no harder than syncing music to the device.
The best use I found for the 600, however, was listening to audiobooks. Audiobook files could be downsampled far more than music and remain understandable, meaning I could fit more of them into the device, and listen for longer periods. Battery life was decent--rated for about 10 hours of play, but if I let a battery (it used a single AA) sit in the Rio for a long while without using it, I would invariably find it had a dead battery next time I wanted to use it.
The Rio was not without its downside, however. First of all, it only came with 16 megabytes of RAM. Even then, it was not a lot; now, Moore's law being what it is, and 5 gig hard-drive-based MP3 players being readily available, it seems like even less. I could, of course, have bought one of the 32- or 64-megabyte "backpacks" to upgrade it, but even that was relatively small compared to the capacity of the minidiscs that a friend of mine was fond of using.
RioPort, the Windows software suite included with the Rio, was not very good. For one thing, it lacked the ability to downsample music; for another, it lacked good facilities for sorting and finding music. All it could do was scan the hard drive to import what it found, and rip CDs into .wma files. If you plan to use the Rio, you would be best advised to find one of the shareware/freeware audio jukebox programs that is also Rio compatible; they will have a much better user interface than RioPort. I never had the chance to fiddle with the open-source Linux Rio sync software, so I do not know how that would work.
The controls of the Rio were also a problem. As the illustration shows, the play, stop, fast forward, and reverse buttons are arranged in a sort of a doughnut-shaped ring around a central selection button. (This also serves as an arrow pad for navigating the Rio's menus.) The problem was that when pressing one button, such as fast forward, it was easy to press the button above or below it (play or stop) by mistake. Many is the time I fast forwarded halfway through a twenty-minute audiobook file (which took several minutes, due to the slow speed of the fast forward feature)...only to discover that I'd pressed the "stop" button by accident as I released it and I had to start all over again.
The greatest liability of the Rio, however, was that due to the way it was designed, it was extremely vulnerable to static electricity. I managed to blow out my Rio discovering this, and had to send it in for service--at which time I discovered by searching the 'net that many other Rio users had the same problem with their machines. If you will be in dry areas with much carpeting, beware.
In the end, the Rio was worth less to me than the money it could bring, so I sold it for about $23 on eBay.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 0.00
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Epinions.com ID:
robotech_master
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Member: Chris Meadows
Reviews written: 26
Trusted by: 3 members
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