c***@yahoo.com
2004-12-23 09:13:40 UTC
I bought entempo spirit 20GB mp3 player from softwareandstuff.com for
$139.I thought it would be a low cost alternative to an iPod or an
Archos, but this thing has several problems.
1. Once you plug it into your computer via USB, you will see it appear
in windows explorer as a new drive letter. You can copy songs directly
to it. The device's user interface, however, will not display the songs
by filename (like the archos) but rather by ID3 tags. Therefore all
your songs must have accurate ID3 tag info otherwise you will have a
hard time finding what you want. The user interface only displays
songs as indexed by the ID3 tag fields. Therefore, if you have
organized your music into subdirectories, this will be useless.
2 the user interface, even when operating correctly, is poor. I have
only 6GB loaded on this thing, about 1800 songs by several hundred
artists or so. Trying to scroll through the list of artists takes
FOREVER because the scrolling does not speed up if you hold down the
jog-button.
3. Playback is poor, I experience multiple "skips" with each and every
song I play
4. Response to button press is extremely poor: pausing, skipping to
the next tune, changing the volume, going to the menu ... attempting
this while a song is playing will often generate no response. it seems
that 9 button presses out of 10 will not work. seems that the software
does not handle button presses at all while accessing the disk.
5. The headphone jack appears to be cheap. using a known good pair of
headphones, I experienced signal loss often unless the plug was
inserted and positioned perfectly. sometimes I would have to twist it
around several times to get it right.
6. The recording quality is 8 bit and sounds pretty lousy.
7. the device is supposed to be shock-resistant, but I found it to be
incredibly shock vulnerable. just picking the thing up off the table
while a song is playing caused it to freeze up and stop responding, and
even stop playing the song !!
8. Generally, in light of points 4 and 7 above, the behavior of this
thing is very unpredictable
Unfortunately, softwareandstuff.com (otherwise known as
surpluscomputers.com) does not offer refunds. all sales are final with
them and they will only replace merchandise for identical merchandise
if it is defective. I would love to get my money back on this thing
because I am very disappointed.
the "about" screen on the device lists the current revision as "0.020"
I tried the firmware update (v1.57) and that changed the revision
code to "0.023 This did not produce any improvement.
I welcome any response from entempo.com or surpluscomputers.com
technicians if they care to refute anything I have said here.
$139.I thought it would be a low cost alternative to an iPod or an
Archos, but this thing has several problems.
1. Once you plug it into your computer via USB, you will see it appear
in windows explorer as a new drive letter. You can copy songs directly
to it. The device's user interface, however, will not display the songs
by filename (like the archos) but rather by ID3 tags. Therefore all
your songs must have accurate ID3 tag info otherwise you will have a
hard time finding what you want. The user interface only displays
songs as indexed by the ID3 tag fields. Therefore, if you have
organized your music into subdirectories, this will be useless.
2 the user interface, even when operating correctly, is poor. I have
only 6GB loaded on this thing, about 1800 songs by several hundred
artists or so. Trying to scroll through the list of artists takes
FOREVER because the scrolling does not speed up if you hold down the
jog-button.
3. Playback is poor, I experience multiple "skips" with each and every
song I play
4. Response to button press is extremely poor: pausing, skipping to
the next tune, changing the volume, going to the menu ... attempting
this while a song is playing will often generate no response. it seems
that 9 button presses out of 10 will not work. seems that the software
does not handle button presses at all while accessing the disk.
5. The headphone jack appears to be cheap. using a known good pair of
headphones, I experienced signal loss often unless the plug was
inserted and positioned perfectly. sometimes I would have to twist it
around several times to get it right.
6. The recording quality is 8 bit and sounds pretty lousy.
7. the device is supposed to be shock-resistant, but I found it to be
incredibly shock vulnerable. just picking the thing up off the table
while a song is playing caused it to freeze up and stop responding, and
even stop playing the song !!
8. Generally, in light of points 4 and 7 above, the behavior of this
thing is very unpredictable
Unfortunately, softwareandstuff.com (otherwise known as
surpluscomputers.com) does not offer refunds. all sales are final with
them and they will only replace merchandise for identical merchandise
if it is defective. I would love to get my money back on this thing
because I am very disappointed.
the "about" screen on the device lists the current revision as "0.020"
I tried the firmware update (v1.57) and that changed the revision
code to "0.023 This did not produce any improvement.
I welcome any response from entempo.com or surpluscomputers.com
technicians if they care to refute anything I have said here.