Cheap MP3 Player / FM Radio from eBay: The Quick n Dirty Review
Friday, 13. March 2009, 06:13:09
I've sorta been looking at MP3 players for a while now, but I particularly needed something which would let me listen to the radio while I'm in Japan. The cheapest option I could think of was to grab something cheap and nasty off of ebay, so I did.
I'm not sure which model this is exactly, but you can pick them up from ebay anywhere between $15-$30 (Aussie dollars). The model I got was the 8GB one, which is more than enough to store all the songs I currently possess.
You can see it's quite small and it weighs almost nothing, I forget it's even in my pocket sometimes.
It comes with some white headphones which are pretty dodgy but you can use the included 2.5->3.5 adapter to use your own headphones.
In the picture above you can see the menu, from which you can navigate to:
- Music
- Movies
- Photos
- Games
- E-books
- Phone book
- Settings
..and maybe some other things I've forgotten
This is what the music section looks like, it has a little equalizer and is supposed to display the name of the current song in the ticker-bar. Unfortunately it seems to struggle with the IDv3 Japanese MP3 tags which most of my music has so it just appears as gibberish.
When I first opened the package, I uploaded my entire music collection onto the player (which you can easily do via USB on both mac and windows) but later realised that you can only put a maximum of 120 songs in each folder, otherwise this thing goes and does some freaky shit with your files leaving you with nothing to do but to reformat it. BUT, if you can split your songs into little folders then I guess it's not too bad.
One major downside to this application is that you can't view and select the song you wanna listen to from a list. Instead you just have to press next and hope it'll come on soon. It's kind of annoying, but if you stick to a pre-arranged playlist which you're happy with then it shouldn't be a big problem.
And to the main reason why I purchased this thing; the radio. I was easily able to pick up the 6 most popular stations in my state and add them to my favourites, the quality of the sound isn't bad, check out a sample of my favourite radio station here. I recorded it with my computer using the input from the player, but you can also record radio on the player itself.
A little plus for me is that it supports the Japanese Radio Band, which uses different frequencies to most other countries, so I feel happy knowing that it'll work while I'm living over in Japan.
The only other section worth mentioning is photos, I just uploaded photos of natsu on there to look at when I feel lonely... The quality isn't fantastic, but it's a nice feature to have.
Overall, this thing is kinda cool, I sort of recommend it (a little bit), especially to those who like to work out and not have a huge freaking brick attached to themselves, and also to those wishing to use radio to learn a foreign language (as I am doing). As I accidentally bought two, I'll be giving the other one to natsu when she comes to Adelaide.
: )
I'm not sure which model this is exactly, but you can pick them up from ebay anywhere between $15-$30 (Aussie dollars). The model I got was the 8GB one, which is more than enough to store all the songs I currently possess.
You can see it's quite small and it weighs almost nothing, I forget it's even in my pocket sometimes.
It comes with some white headphones which are pretty dodgy but you can use the included 2.5->3.5 adapter to use your own headphones.
In the picture above you can see the menu, from which you can navigate to:
- Music
- Movies
- Photos
- Games
- E-books
- Phone book
- Settings
..and maybe some other things I've forgotten
This is what the music section looks like, it has a little equalizer and is supposed to display the name of the current song in the ticker-bar. Unfortunately it seems to struggle with the IDv3 Japanese MP3 tags which most of my music has so it just appears as gibberish.
When I first opened the package, I uploaded my entire music collection onto the player (which you can easily do via USB on both mac and windows) but later realised that you can only put a maximum of 120 songs in each folder, otherwise this thing goes and does some freaky shit with your files leaving you with nothing to do but to reformat it. BUT, if you can split your songs into little folders then I guess it's not too bad.
One major downside to this application is that you can't view and select the song you wanna listen to from a list. Instead you just have to press next and hope it'll come on soon. It's kind of annoying, but if you stick to a pre-arranged playlist which you're happy with then it shouldn't be a big problem.
And to the main reason why I purchased this thing; the radio. I was easily able to pick up the 6 most popular stations in my state and add them to my favourites, the quality of the sound isn't bad, check out a sample of my favourite radio station here. I recorded it with my computer using the input from the player, but you can also record radio on the player itself.
A little plus for me is that it supports the Japanese Radio Band, which uses different frequencies to most other countries, so I feel happy knowing that it'll work while I'm living over in Japan.
The only other section worth mentioning is photos, I just uploaded photos of natsu on there to look at when I feel lonely... The quality isn't fantastic, but it's a nice feature to have.
Overall, this thing is kinda cool, I sort of recommend it (a little bit), especially to those who like to work out and not have a huge freaking brick attached to themselves, and also to those wishing to use radio to learn a foreign language (as I am doing). As I accidentally bought two, I'll be giving the other one to natsu when she comes to Adelaide.
: )
This was a very frightening process for me but in the end I was more than pleased with the result.
I stuffed up this process a few times (each stuff up costs about 30 mins of reflashing the OS ><, so be careful!)
EBPocket is THE reason why I purchased the Axim. If you're interested in learning Japanese check out Peter Rivard's extremely helpful website (
One thing I've been wanting to buy for quite some time is the Casio XD-GW9600. Any guess at what exactly that could be? It's an English-Japanese electronic dictionary. You may have seen the Japanese students using them at school or at uni before, they're small and expensive things and are damn hard to buy in Australia, as well as the rest of all the western countries. Kinda makes me mad how disconnected Australia is from Asian languages and culture, maybe Rudd can do something about it....
WIDGETIZE
