The Nomad: To buy or not to buy.
Written: Feb 01 '01 (Updated Feb 01 '01)
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Pros: Small size, weight and convenience.
Cons: Headphones are not quality
The Bottom Line: It has been reliable, but needed a few workarounds. Try it before you buy it.
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| m3buff's Full Review: Creative Technology Nomad Jukebox (32 MB) MP3 Play... |
STRENGTHS:
Small size, weight and convenience.
WEAKNESSES:
Headphones are junk - they fall out of your ears unless you are sitting still - not the case in the gym or dancing. I use a set of Sony sport phones.
Software for the Nomad is terrible- fortunately you use it only when you load new music. Here are the problems:
1) 8 character filenames - most MP3 fans use long filenames for the their music that include the artist and the title. The Nomad software and the Nomad truncate these to 8 characters - I thought this went out with DOS? Why ? The software also doesn't seem to reliably use the MP3 track information either - so this is a real problem.
2) The software won't connect to docking station/player unless you press a button on the player to turn it on. If you don't do something for about a minute - the player goes idle and you get connection errors, and you have to press a button again and reconnect - really stupid!
3) Lastly the software won't play a song you are browsing! This so annoying - you have to separately run Winamp or something to check out the music you want to load.
The unit seems to be REALLY ESD (electro static discharge) sensitive. Sometimes if you touch it with something metallic - sometimes it gets zapped and it crashes. In the gym - touching a free weight to the pocket of my sweats is sometimes enough. Usually, you just power it off and on and it's OK. Once in a while the crash is so BAD that you have to remove the batteries to fully reset it. This wouldn't be so bad, but the battery compartment is screwed shut by a microscopic screw. When this happens - it means a dead player until you can get home to your jewelers screw driver.
I just found out - by calling Creative - that the Nomad won't support the new 64MB flash cards - this is INSANE - it would have cost them nothing to support this!
SUMMARY:
I bought myself the Nomad 64 as a Christmas present in '99 and have now used it for 12 months. Overall I love it. I use it for working out in the gym and for practicing my ballroom dancing. It's ideal for both. It's small size allows me to just drop in my pocket and listen to whatever I want. From time to time I use the FM tuner - which is only OK - the reception is OK - not great. Haven't tried the voice recording feature yet. It has a few annoying weaknesses - but I would buy it again and I paid $249 for it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 249
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Epinions.com ID:
m3buff
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Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 5 members
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