Some unpleasant firmware issues, but this unit rocks!
Written: Jan 10 '04
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Pros: Joystick is mostly a pro, great value, excellent sound, nice design. Light!
Cons: UMS setup a pain; making it work with the other great features was flat ugly.
The Bottom Line: A great product that's almost there. Digitalway shouldn't have shipped until they got their firmware support for UMS done, because the combination MP3/UMS/FM/Recorder combo is outstanding.
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| epining's Full Review: Mpio FY200 (128 MB) MP3 Player |
I wasn't familiar with this brand or Korean manufacturer, but saw it at Best Buy and liked the design enough to give it a chance. I haven't been disappointed. This is a great little unit with excellent sound quality. It's extremely compact and lightweight, and with a ton of features for the price. It really is about the size of a large disposable lighter, and is very attractively designed.
Some of the more unusual features include a voice-operated recorder (VOR) with automatic gain control. There's also a built in equalizer with several built-in presets. The dynamic bass mode provides surprisingly rich bass with provided headphones.
The biggest bugaboo was getting the device to work as a USB Mass Storage (UMS) device, which required a firmware upgrade, downloadable from mpio.com. While not rocket science, this is not for the fainthearted and took a lot of mucking about to finally get working the way I had hoped.
Digitalway just put out (1/10/04) on their http://www.mpio.com" target="_blank site a much needed additional doc on the firmware upgrade process. It helps, but they would have been better off just getting the UMS support solid before shipping. When I initially upgraded to the 1.05 firmware to support UMS, the UMS worked fine but all the other functions dropped off the radar (e.g. MP3, FM radio, recorder). Not good. You can buy a 128 MB mass storage device a lot cheaper than $140 (or $100, with the $40 rebate).
The way I finally got it all working was to install the 1.05 firmware upgrade, then ran the "Recover" function (the big green button in the middle ) of the FY200 RCV utility. Everything now appears to work--MP3, FM, Record, and plus you can use it as a UMS device, which is great. Actually, with the UMS support you can skip Digitalway's MPIO Manager client and just drag-and-drop your mp3's to the device. The MPIO Manager is still useful to do the firmware upgrades, and is required if you don't have UMS.
Note: I HIGHLY recommend saving your data and shutting all other applications while using the MPIO Manager client. This puppy BSD'ed (Blue Screen of Death) on me a couple of times while initially working with it under Win2K, and left a 400 MB MEMORY.DMP file in my \WINNT directory (and a slow reboot, as an extra bonus). Make sure to use the provided tray utility to gracefully "unplug" the device. If you pull the USB plug without doing it, you may see a BSD.
All said, this is a nice little device. This is a classic case where if the vendor had just done the final 10% to ensure proper fit-and-finish rather than rushing it to market, it would have made for a much better customer experience. I'll bet Best Buy gets a lot of these returned, which is a shame. I also wish I'd bought the 256 MB model.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 140
Recommended for: Athletes - Lightweight and Portable, Perfect for the Gym
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Epinions.com ID:
epining
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Reviews written: 1
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