A great player, with serious problems
Written: Mar 24 '04
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Sound: |
 |
|
| Ease of Use: |
|
|
| Durability: |
 |
|
| Portability: |
 |
|
| Battery Life: |
|
|
|
Pros: Small, cheap, easy to use. Good sound and many features.
Cons: Firmware is terrible, the player stops functioning properly.
The Bottom Line: I wouldn't recommend this product.
Although it has many excellent features, you are really taking a gamble buying one as they have given many people many problems.
Save your money.
|
|
|
| deleatur's Full Review: Creative Technology Rhomba (256 MB) MP3 Player |
I've had the Rhomba player (MX200 in Australia) for about 4 months and thought it was the greatest thing ever.
It outputs great sound; it’s easy to use, and inexpensive.
It's small enough to slip into your pocket and is nicely designed but unobtrusive. This is a good thing if you're like me and travel on public transport a lot - you don't really want to advertise that you own anything worth stealing.
This might sound finicky, but the sticker on the back of the player isn’t printed well and the text (information on the player and model number) rubs off within weeks of regular use. The only text left is the player’s serial number, which seems to be printed in a more stable ink.
Sound quality is excellent; you can have it very loud with no distortion. The supplied headphones are of a good quality. They are the 'behind the neck' sort, which can get a little tricky if you need to take your headphones off to talk to someone.
The radio function is good... it seems to pick up most stations easily. You can also program it for different countries radio frequencies.
The record function is something I haven't really used. It's sort of handy for taking notes but it picks up a lot of background noise so it's not something you could really use for professional recordings.
To access the menus of the player, you have to click down the menu scroll wheel. Once you've done that you can access settings for the equalizer, backlight settings, etc.
I'd list all the functions inside the menus, if I could access them (more on that later)
The main function of the player of course, is MP3 and WMA.
It handles them relatively well. To load files onto the player all you need to do is plug the USB cable into the player and your computer, and if you have Windows XP like I do, it'll pop up an explorer interface for you to drag and drop files into the player - very easy.
Once you've disconnected the player, you can navigate to the folder/s where your music is sitting and start listening. The player scrolls the file name of the song, there is no ID3 support. This is fine if you are the sort of person that names all your mp3s in an [artist]-[song name].mp3 type fashion.
While listening you can pause and skip through songs.
When you turn off the player, it remembers what song you were last listening to and plays it from the start, not part way through where you left off. This could be frustrating for people who listen to long recordings such as audio books.
Unfortunately this player is seriously flawed.
After a couple of months of use, my player started having serious problems. Not knowing what to do, I looked on the creative site for answers. What I came across were the creative Europe support forums. It was there that I learnt that this particular player has a lot of issues.
http://uk.europe.creative.com/support/forums/thread.asp?thre=43198
My player would turn itself off. Or it would turn its screen off.
Sometimes, it *wouldn't* turn off, and would crash.
This would happen intermittently.
Then I installed the firmware patch, and I was a happy, trouble free listener for about a week - until the player wouldn't work at all. It would turn on, but would get stuck on the opening menu, and would make no sound and then would turn itself off.
I re-applied the firmware - and JOY the player sprang to life. For about 20 minutes. Then I got an "English only font" error. The creative website said to re-apply the firmware. So, I tried. Unfortunately, the error also seems to stop the player communicating with my computer.
After corresponding to with the prompt email support from creative, my life with this player has been full of formats and re-installs. This seems to be their suggested fix for every problem
Since I have had the player creative have released 3 different firmware upgrades. With each upgrade, a few of my problems get fixed, and a few new ones are created.
Currently, the backlight does not work, the screen freezes after a couple of seconds, I can't access the menu system, and the player distorts for a couple of seconds each time I adjust the volume.
I also can't return my player to creative as I bought it overseas and no longer have a receipt. Apparently even if I did have the receipt I’d still have to pay them $50 to try and fix the player. To be honest, I don't think I want a replacement.
I think I shall check out the reviews on the IPod mini.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 166
Recommended for: Beginners - Easy Enough for Tech Newbies
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
deleatur
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 1 member
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.