I liked it...
Written: Jan 30 '03 (Updated Jan 30 '03)
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Pros: size, sound quality, memory
Cons: Battery life, buggy software
The Bottom Line: Good value for money, big memory, ~7 hours battery life.
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| poppins2's Full Review: Rio 900 (192 MB) MP3 Player |
I was looking for a good mp3 player for long time and finally decided to get rio900 and I love it. It is very small, I am carrying it everywhere. I can play it in my car. thanks to rio cassette adapter included with the player.. that works great with my car stereo. I use it while jogging, working, cooking. everywhere.. and It holds about 40 songs at 128kbps!! thats really good.
Display is great.. real-one player is able to store title, artist and Album information with the song. And rio900 displays it. Windows media player transfers only the song and filename.
There is one extra button, it is called "backlight" button.. but I think they could have used it for bookmarking or choosing play list or may be customizable button!!! "backlight" gets activated by pressing any button... so you dont need a separate button for that!
It is working fine with all the mp3 files I played so far.
battery life:
In specs and the display says after full charge it will run for 10-11 hours. I played it in a loop.. It ran for only 6-1/2 hour. I sent a email to support and they forwarded me links to webpages describing how to charge, calibrate etc... I tried those.. looks like it is now running for little bit longer. But I have not measured it yet. At riohome website search for those documents in support webpage or send email with some keywords... Anyway I am happy with 6-1/2 hours. The charger is not that big to carry. There is a car charger available at sonicblue website.
usb-connection:
Once connected to computer, if the mp3 player goes to sleep mode you will have to disconnect and reconnect before transfer/copy file. Otherwise you will get error saying no storage or space available blah blah...
I read somewhere that it happens only if it is connected through a usb-hub. Since I am too lazy to go behind my computer, I have not tried connecting directly yet.
This is not a problem with windows media player. On real-one if you disconnect, you loose the list of files you selected to copy. So, if you take too long to decide what songs to copy, you will have to redo it. So what I was did was, copy songs to an empty play list first, connect rio900, copy songs from play list.
playlist+bookmark:
works fine separately. But if you combine both playlist and bookmarks, it doesnt work. If you set a bookmark at nth song in a playlist and try to return to the bookmark, it will goto the n.th song in the player, even if you have enabled the same play list. In the list of bookmarks, it shows the song name correctly, but when you choose it, it starts playing different song. May be they will fix it in next release of firmware for this player.
random delete,add songs.
You end up deleteing the wrong song. There were about 25 songs in the player. I deleted a 7Mb song from the player using real-one player. That song was in the middle. Then I added two 3 Mb songs. on the player it was showing those new songs in the middle, but on real one it was showing files at the end. Then I pressed "Refresh" on real-one player, now all the file size information is messed up in real-one player for songs stored from the middle to the end. If I delete those songs using real-one player, it deletes the wrong song. I tried this several times and it happened everytime..
I have not tried delete track feature from player itself and see if real-one gets updates correctly... Anyway, since I am maintaining a play list with all the songs copied to player(for usb-connection problem), I can format memory and transfer all songs together. It takes about 13 minutes to transfer 190 MB songs to my rio900.
I did send couple of emails to support on these problems and got automated replies. Those were good for battery life problem...
I love this player and couple of friends are already looking for better deals. I got one from costco. Good price.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 135-incl-tax
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Epinions.com ID:
poppins2
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Reviews written: 1
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