Purcahsed for Price Impressed with what I recieved
Written: Sep 20 '08
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Pros: Very cheap. Good looking. Good build quality. DIY Friendly. Good Feature Set.
Cons: Needs a speaker. Needs to rethink "button" functions and screen layout just a little.
The Bottom Line: Overall a great little multifunction player with only a few issues that are minor at most. Definate Must buy.
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| nerys71's Full Review: SupportPlus France MP3-EL207-IUS Ellipse 2 GB MP3/... |
First it IS still available. $18 shipped free in "red" from buy.com just do a search for invion or ellipse (same thing)
I purchased 2 of these simple because they were $17.99 with free Shipping 2gb and RED. My mother loves red but fears carrying her Red zune around so I figured this would be a great birthday gift. A Cheapy mp3 player that would be less painful to lose.
The price was so cheap I purchased 2 of them to keep one for myself. I am a sucker for a neat gadget.
So I get them in the mail and I am first very impressed with 2 things. 1 its very slim. Seriously slim as in give a nano a run for its money maybe even thinner type seriously.
Second the screen is very large. Unlike most mp4 chinese knockoff mp3 players with micro sized screens this one has a pretty healthy screen.
Its oval shaped (think oval racetrack) and gets thinner smoothly from center to edges. Like a giant "pill"
It has your standard 4way toggle with center button. Bonus it also has a physical on off switch on the back cover. I like this. No accidental turns on when in your bag pocket etc.. Sadly no "hold" switch. The buttons are pretty firm so it won't easily activate on its own. IT WILL charge and sync just fine regardless of the position of the on off switch. Thats good would suck to plug it in for a few hours and get no charge because you forgot to turn it on :-)
My next surprise was the immense options the player has. I was not expecting anything more than a run of the mill MP3 player. What I got was an ebook reader (not that useful on such a small screen but hey why not) picture viewer and video player. It also has GAMES built into the player! Did not expect that. While I may not have any interest in the little games it comes with I know my sister and my mother "love" these kinds of little games.
It also has a Voice recorder built into it (and the requisite microphone) it can record well over 100 hours of voice recording.
Sadly no FM radio (its on the menu but it "skips" that icon automatically) poo hoo hoo :-)
One thing its missing is a little built in speaker. That would have been nice for the voice recorder function but by no means a deal breaker.
Sound quality is quite acceptable. Sound like any other mp3 player. No abarent sounds or hisses or distortions. Sounds normal.
Screen shuts off while player. I am not sure of the battery life. After hours and hours of playing with it I have never come close to depleting the battery so I am guessing in excess of 6 hours probably 8-10 hours. I really do not know.
Its small enough and light enough that hanging it from your neck is quite feasible. Comes with your standard cheapy set of ear buds. This player would pair nicely with a set of in ear sonies with the "short" cable as you could easily hang this from your neck or toss in a shirt pocket and never even know its there.
Overall I am very impressed with my purchased double so when you consider the $18 price tag. You just can not beat that.
I was at first annoyed when MPT protocol came up when I plugged it in but a quick check under the settings menu on the player and I was able to change the disk mode to the desired USB Mass Storage mode.
One negative here is that its REALLY slow. Even just "deleting" files takes minutes not seconds. It behaves like a USB1 Device maybe even a tiny bit slower. But at 2gb its not that bad really. Especially again when you consider this next to what you paid for it. Well worth it.
Now its just a 2gb thumbdrive to the computer. You can put your files anywhere on the player it does not care. For my own sake I created a Video folder for the videos MP3 for music and Pics for Pictures.
You can "subdivide" by folder name and you can access these folders from the player.
From most locations you can press and hold "menu" to return to the main menu where you can select player mode (video music picture games etc..)
It also uses a standard Mini A USB cable which is greatly appreciated.
OK now onto the negatives.
First charging. IT WILL ONLY (so far) charge from a computer. IE it detects the presense of a computer and "then" accepts the voltage to charge. I know motorola charges are a bit different so I will try that but I am not hopeful. This means 12adaptors battery adaptors are no good to recharge this player. Thats a pity.
Next the "GUI", once your playing music, has a lot to be desired. Its a "cutesy" interface that tries to be graphically interesting but all it does is use up all the screen real estate for anything except whats important Namely Song name etc.. It only has 9 and 11 characters of space for displaying song title information.
I would even go so far as to say they should have made the mp3 player "landscape" ie sideways to double the amount of characters they could devote to the names. This becomes especially prevalent when you try to navigate the folder structure. IE keep your folder names short at least and make sure they do not all start with the same words or you will have trouble distinguishing one folder from another. While it does scroll the title it does NOT scroll folder names etc..
Its a little "slow" in the voice recorder. Takes a while to load that module and there is a delay from when you hit record to when it records.
One nice feature is it will not "stop" when you press play again. Instead it pauses. Like a "lap" timer on a stop watch. This is great for pausing to gather your thoughts WITHOUT generating a new file. To stop and save the file you press and hold the play pause button.
The "Human Interface" while not complex is not intuitive.
It has a 4 way with center button. up is Menu down is VOL left and right are skip forward and back and center is play/pause
Assumptions are made as to how to work things like this its assumed that you would use the 4 way to navigate and the center to "select" but this is NOT the case. instead you use left right middle and down to navigate (think inverted arrow keys on your keyboard) and you use MENU (up) to "select" in most screens.
To actually PLAY something "now" you use the center play pause button. to RECORD a voice "now" you use the center play pause button.
in games its the same way. in the bubbles style game I have to use left right down and center as my 4 way movement and UP menu as my "select" button.
While not hard it is definately non intuitive.
The unit is very DIY friendly as it uses 3 screws to hold the back of the player on 6 more will completely dissassemble the player. I appreciate this as I like taking things apart and it also means, potentially, that the user, with a little daring, might be able to successfully and non destructively replace the battery in a few years when it peters out.
On inspection it comes apart quite easily. The battery is a nice square and is 3.7v 220mah in capacity. while it does not have a DIY friendly "plug" it does have nice segregated spread apart solder terminals on the player board whereas anyone with basic soldering skills who uses some caution can resolder easily enough. Personally I would leave the wires in place and "cut" them at the battery and use them as a tether to your new battery. IE it will not be hard to keep this player going for some time to come. It uses Samsung memory for the storage chip as well.
If you goto nerys.com/epinions/invion2gb you can see some images of the unit and its guts splayed out for your pleasure.
Some other bits of information.
The video playback is "not bad" considering the cost of the unit etc.. Its AMV video format only. You can get free software thats very fast at converting video. Its "ok" for tiny clips but the lack of a speaker means you have to put headphones on or plug it into something to get the sound. Its nice but not compelling.
The voice function is rather nice but again hampered by the lack of speaker.
Picture viewing is simple but lackluster in performance. There must be a "trick" to properly encoding the images for mine looked horrendous on the screen yet the ones that came with it looked fine. I will have to work on that as it makes a rather nice picture display with its cheaper than those mini picture keychain price tag and much larger screen.
I believe the screen resolution is 128x160 (at least thats the resolution of the images that came with it and it accepted video at that resolution)
Overall I am impressed. Definately a good buy and a nice looking fun little player. If you have any need for a cheap but nice little mp3 player definately go get on of these you won't regret it.
One more thing I do not like is how "easily" water will be able to get into this. the head phone jack is flush but you can SEE the screen right through the headphone jack IE direct path for water. Because of how DIY friendly this is however there is great potential for water proofing this. I would easily see "encasing" the headphone jack USB jack and sorrounding the Button board in "hot glue" effectively making the player water resistant. Horray for screws that make taking this apart easy.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 17.99
Recommended for: Athletes - Lightweight and Portable, Perfect for the Gym
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Epinions.com ID:
nerys71
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Member: Chris Taylor Jr.
Location: Edgely, PA
Reviews written: 37
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
I Love Rockets, Airplanes, and off course Gadgets :-)
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