Most people still look at feature-rich portable multimedia players (PMPs) with suspicion. After all, they argue, what’s the point in spending Rs15,000 on a PMP when you can get a truly converged, all-in-one cellphone for the same price? It’s a fair question. But then, why do people still buy camcorders when digital cameras can capture videos too? Because all converged devices need not necessarily replace the devices they were designed to supersede.
PMPs fall in this category. No matter how you look at it, if you’re serious about your music quality, you would still opt for a dedicated player rather than a jack of all trades. Don’t get us wrong. We love our N97s and iPhones as much as anybody else, but we still reach for our PMPs when we want to chill to our favourite music or watch a video.
So we’ve drawn up a collection of portable media players to suit every budget. We used a mixture of music from different genres and AVI video files to judge the sound and video quality of these devices. For music, we used a reference Grado SR225 headphone coupled with a headphone amplifier. Using a high quality third-party headphone is important since it eliminates the impact of substandard earphones, which is what most PMPs ship with.
Apacer AU824
A neat looking PMP with a garish and overdone mock chrome finish on the rear that made me go “ugh”! The front is neat though with the buttons resembling a cellphone layout, albeit much larger. There is a centre button for play/pause and four directional keys around it. A tiny menu button is also provided to the right of these buttons. The centre button is finished in matte-silver and this along with the chrome rim around the buttons adds some colour to an already colourful black and navy blue body. The centre button has a rubbery feedback. Build quality is good but it looks like everything was put together in a hurry especially considering the misalignment of the USB port. There’s a switch on the player that selects between playback and USB mode.
Also Read Groove on the move | Cowon D2+, Cowon iAudio 7, Cowon S9, iPod Touch 32 GB
Groove on the move | Philips GoGear Aria, GoGear Opus, Samsung YP-P3 , Samsung YP-Q2
How we tested
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