Excellent, often overlooked, buy!
Written: Feb 04 '02 (Updated Jul 16 '02)
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Pros: Tiny size & weight, expandability
Cons: Only 32 MB built-in
The Bottom Line: I highly recommend this very neat little MP3 player. Definitely buy an expansion card for added memory!
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| nyceric's Full Review: Toshiba gigabeat MEA210 (32 MB) MP3 Player |
As MP3 players gained popularity over the past few years, I always hesitated to buy one because of their price, limited memory, and large size (not much smaller than walkmen). I recently bought the Toshiba MEA-210 and none of those criticisms apply! This is a great little machine!
First, let's look at the physical specifications. The MEA-210 is two inches by two inches by half of an inch! It's much smaller than any other MP3 player that I've seen and very "handsome." It's also very lightweight even with the battery (one AAA battery) in place. Furthermore, it comes with a belt/pocket clip that works well without adding much bulk. The included earphones are standard ones that fit in one's ears. The screen shows 2 lines of 12 characters and the song names conveniently scroll along the top.
The MEA-210 has a secure digital (SD) slot (more about that below), a slot that connects to a PC's USB port, a headphone jack (well, I suppose that goes without saying...), and four buttons. One button is the power/play/pause one, another lets you skip backward/forward between songs, another is the "menu" button, and the final one is an 'up/down' button for the menu. The menu button cycles between volume, tone (five different equalizer settings including extra bass), "play media" (either built-in memory or SD card), repeat, and "beep" (which just controls whether a little noise sounds every time one presses a button).
The sound quality is very good (limited by the quality of my mp3 songs) and the volume goes much higher (louder) than I ever use. Regarding battery life, I've listened to over four hours of music on one AAA battery at pretty reasonable volumes.
The 32 MB of memory is, admittedly, very skimpy and only allows me to hold about six to eight songs at any one time. However, the SD slot more than compensates. Just to give a little background, this type of expansion card is standard in most Palm PDAs and is available in many different megabite sizes (from 8 MB to, as far as I know, 128 MB). SD cards are neither expensive nor cheap (for example, a 64 MB card costs $69.99 on Amazon.com but is cheaper through internet auction sites) and even adding the price of a 64 MB card to the MEA-210's sticker sums to less than the price of it's competitors.
Finally, a word about the PC software. The included "Audio Manager" is a relatively straight-forward program that lets one add new music to the MEA-210 from one's PC via the USB port. It takes some getting used to but is more than adequate.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 200
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Epinions.com ID:
nyceric
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Location: New York City
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 3 members
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