Daily Archives: September 2, 2006

This is the Chinese Ipod Nano It is smaller and cheaper and also filled with feature that ipod nano could only dream of. Even Sony should be proud of the player even though their name was faked on it. An ipod nano cost around 7000 Rs that’s the best deal you can get and the Chinese nano only costs 1500 Rs. So you could buy 4 Chinese Nano’s.You thought nano was smaller wait till you see this. Look how small it looks beside a pen. Its so tiny that you can put it in your pocket without you even knowing its their.Back side of the player is plain like nano. And it even looks rugged than a scratchy nano.Its just more than a pen in the width. But still not by much.The controls are really nice too, just easy to learn and look at them they are labeled well and are easy to use. Just like all the other players after rigorous use you have to press them littler harder but by this time Ipod Nano would be dead with battery problems or scratch problems so don’t worry.Now some features about the player. Its has 256 Mb memory out of which 241 is available for use. if you encode your songs at 8K its more than 500 songs. Even at 32 k you can get more than 100 songs. Thats more than 6 to 8 hours of music. Don’t listen to anyone who says about quality because no matter which mp3 player you buy you will not get better quality than this even on a ipod nano. But still it better than nano why read bel ow.Its got inbuilt fm radio so you will get more music and you don’t have to carry any adapters like the nano. I have heard fm radio in cities like chennai and bangalore on this and the quality is fine. Not only that when you are listing to your favorite songs if you want to record it you can do that too. If you record in the format that is specific to the player it can record each song for less 100 kb or so. you can later convert that song into mp3 on your PC or just keep it like that and listen to it on your player and computer.The menu system is very simple you click the center button to activate what ever you seen on screen and the side way arrows are for navigation. The top button is for the menu and below one is also for navigation. The volume is controlled by the side way arrow keys also.Even with my crappy photos you can see the navigation system well. But in reality the menu are really good looking and readable and the player is quite responsive.There is a cool animation that comes up on the screen when ever its shuts down or stars up. Which is quite nice feature. You will be stunned to see the video of it for the first time on such a small screen. When you turn the player on with the button on top it switches on and plays a video and go to sleep then when you press the play button the player starts playing. so that nice.Here is the screen that you will see when the songs is playing. As you can see it shows quite a lot of information which is quite readable. you can see the bit rate and format of the song. Repeat option, equalizer, time of the songs and the amount of time finished, name of the folder, name of the songs. and below you can see the number of the song in the folder and the total number of songs. and the volume icon with number indication 27. It can go up to 40 so you know the volume is quite loud. and then at Last the battery indicator. There is also another nice feature you can see the lyrics for the songs as you play them. But there is some work to be done to get the lyrics. you can download a plugin called Lyrics II whi ch is a winamp plugin play your songs with the plugin switched on you see the lyrics. Now go to that folder and copy the .lrc files and put them on the player and they will show up when you press and hold the menu button while the songs is playing. more details about the battery read on.The battery life is more than 10 hours in my experience. You can customize the screen to go dark after one second to any where between 10 seconds which will improve battery life even further. You can even set the brightness of the screen to improve battery life.It has some nice features like this text reader which can be used for any file that is .txt format. it could be some address a book or shopping list anything. So its really helpful. just copy the .txt file that you created in your notepad and it shows up in the text reader from their you can read it. As you can see quite well at that. For nano you need to convert file using some program, here its just txt files.Another feature  is voice recorder. As you can see my player was full and I still could record 4 minutes of voice or fm radio songs. if the player is empty or like 100 Mb I can record more than 15 hours or so. Which is really nice. As you can see the file format is .act which is player specific which can be converted on your computer to mp3 using the provided software. Even nano needs encoding and converting.Other features are Video player which needs converting and works just fine. There is also a photo viewer. Which you need to make images small which can be done by any number of programs. Similar to nano since the screen is small these feature are not for much use other than showing off which is what we want to do.The power adaptor is so small that its looks bigger than the player. But still nice features two lights that indicate when its charging and when its full. The power adapter has pins that fold into the adapter so its easier to carry them anywhere.The USB cable can be used as the charging cable too. So one less wire to carry when you connect the player to the computer it chargers that way too. So those are nice options. The whole audio solution is just handful. Means you can carry the whole thing in your one hand. Can you say that about your nano.Below the player has the USB port and the top has a power button so no buttons all over the place which is nice.There are more features like the auto switch off and other small features which makes it better than nano. I don’t need itunes or anything like that just connect it to the pc and it shows up has a removable drive. just drag and drop files.Conclusions.My biggest worry was that since the player was made by chinese or that’s what it says on the player i was worried about the quality. But after six months of use its still working fine and in perfect condition. Its not the same story for some of the ipod Nano they are scratched, battery has lost its power etc. Since the price is low i could buy four of them before they reach the same price as the nano. Like all the players after quite a bit use the buttons become a bit hard but still more than usable.The player is so good that i have used it to recorded 75 songs through fm radio for the last six months and its really easy to do too. And also listened to more than my share of songs.So if you have 1500 Rs don’t wait a moment go and buy them. you can get them online here http://shopping.indiatimes.com. or you can get them at burma bazaar in bangalore or any black market place that sells electronics.So Ipod Nano eat my Shinny little chinese nano ass.you can see a video review of the player by some one. he doesn’t like it, he is stupid. but you can see the player in action. Video Review MP4 Player