29 May 2005 18:28 pm
So often I write a review of the latest technology I have got my hands on and give it a great write-up. Then a few months down the line it is broken, half of the functions don’t work and I think it is a really terrible bit of technology. So I am going to hold off reviewing the iFP-795 for a while.
That said, now I have got used to it, I might as well publish some kind of information on it. Let’s start with some product information. It’s a flash based memory player with 512mb of memory, a built in radio, microphone, line-in recorder and upgradeable firmware.
The first thing I did when I got it was to upgrade the firmware. Why? Because I wanted to install the UMS version (UMS stands for USB Mass Storage). Basically instead of it being recognised as an MP3 player when you plug it in, this way it’s treated like a memory stick so you can drag and drop files like a USB memory stick.
The device is pretty easy to use. It’s a little daunting at first trying to work out how to navigate through everything but once you can do one thing the controls are intuitive enough that you know how to get around.
Support for Windows Media Audio and Vorbis (ogg) as well as MP3 mean that you can get some quality compression to fit more stuff on it. I encoded two of my albums into Vorbis from MP3 (I know you shouldn’t but I couldn’t be bothered fishing out my albums ;), the first one got me from 40mb to 30mb though the second one I got down to 60mb from 160mb.
The radio tuner isn’t bad though let’s face it, which of us is going to be listening to radio? I mean we wouldn’t pay £95 if we just wanted a portable radio. Although for the times you do listen to it it’s pretty slow to scroll through but you can save up to twenty presets (I’ve used one so far lol, but I’m planning to save a second).
Playing music is simple enough. You press the play button and it starts playing ;). Though you can also browse through all the different folders and select a file to play. You can select loads of different modes too – loop through everything, loop through the folder, shuffle and every combination in between, there are like a dozen of them.
Audio quality seems pretty good though you have to consider I’ve been playing Vorbis files converted from MP3’s on neck phones that cost like £10 (they don’t do expensive ones or I would buy them!). The headphones that come with the player are pretty good although I thought the ones I got with my Sony player are better.
The battery life seems pretty good, the claim is 40 hours. I have been playing it like 3-4 hours maybe and it’s still on full battery on the meter from the battery that came with it. It is powered by AA’s although you can use rechargeable apparently.
So overall it is quite a solid player. It’s so great to be able to run around the house or go jogging with it out it tripping off as my “skip-free” CD player did. I’ve still got a lot of features to test though so far, thumbs up.
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