Heavenly gadget makes a good phone superb
Written: Mar 03 '02 (Updated Mar 11 '02)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Dirt cheap, tiny, super-lightweight, slinky and sexy design, decent sounding too!
Cons: Requires an Ericsson phone, but then again that's no bad thing ;-)
The Bottom Line: For $49 dollars, a sexy product which integrates so nicely with an already suave range of phones is irresistibly purchaseable, especially when it sounds so reasonable and looks fab!
|
|
|
| g23t54s's Full Review: Ericsson Hpm 10 Digital Player - 32mb |
After giving the Rio 600 MP3 player such a glowing review, some people would question the reason why I have replaced it for a product with exactly the same storage capacity. Simple: the HPM-10 was dirt cheap and is so sexy you wouldn't believe. Plus it's upgradable, amazingly lightweight, uses virtually no battery juice, doesn't require it's own power source...honestly, the list of this wunder-gadget talents is endless.
Now I am a self confessed gadget freak, but I surpassed myself by buying this wonder. It weighs about the same as 15 of my multi-vitamin tablets, it is that lightweight. And running it for 40 minutes drained an estimated 3 hours standby time from my T39m (which I can lose by chatting for five minutes, to put that into context). The other major boon is the fact you can have several MultiMedia Cards (MMCs) which can then act as albums or compilations as you can swap them at will - although half an hour of music will set your wallet back £20 GBP, (about $30 USD?). The MMCs themselves are slightly bigger than a SIM card, some techno-phobic friends of mine could not believe that I could get the equivalent of two CD albums on something the size of a small stamp (using a 128MB card).
Now personally I did not buy it to use as a handsfree kit, but in handsfree mode with the supplied headphones/microphone it is far better than most due to the fact you get two earpieces instead of one and so background noise/interference is a thing of the past. The call end button is quite nifty too. However I have only used this function once as the supplied headphones are not of the quality I wanted. Don't get me wrong, they are much better than the ones that you usually get bundled with MP3 players (my old Rio 600 being one example), but for £0.99 GBP (65¢?) you can get a 3.5mm stereo to 2.5mm stereo adapter plug and use much better headphones with it. Be sure to get a stereo to stereo adapter though as I was almost fobbed off twice with a stereo to mono adapter: the stereo ones have two plastic stripes on the jack, the mono ones only have one.
Anyway, enough of me lecturing, what does it sound like when connected to an amp, or whatever? Fine, is my answer. Considering the size of it it does very well, and if you fine-tune the sound using the controls that magically appear on your phone once you connect it it sounds extremely reasonable.
The integration of the MP3 player with the Ericsson handset is very good, the speaker volume control now controls the headphone volume; the left and right buttons become track skip buttons, the number correspond to tracks you may have downloaded. My only gripe is that it takes too many menus to access the device if you stop it and make a call, then come back to it. But for something so slinky it is a small price to pay.
Coupled with a phone such as my T39m it looks fine, although I don't know if the baby blue/silver design would complement every Ericsson handset. As you may have guessed now my final verdict on this phone is that it is a brilliant piece of kit, and will have owners of Siemens/Samsung phones turning green when they realise they could have had an MP3 player in a phone which is as funky and easy to use as an Ericsson (I've owned a Siemens and the menu navigation was awful, to put it bluntly). And for £35 GBP its nothing short of a miracle! So where did I get this marvel for £35 I hear you all ask? www.expansys.com - UK firm but ship literally anywhere. They're a fab little firm who always ship pronto. And no, I am not their PR manager, I just like the company!
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
g23t54s
|
|
Location: Manchester, UK
Reviews written: 12
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Poor underfunded student currently at the Uni of Manchester, UK who likes his 'stuff'.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.