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Ibusbi Max 20GB MP3 Player
30 September 2008
An interesting but poorly designed MP3 player.
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The Ibusbi Max 20GB MP3 Player is on the surface a pretty good
player, but at a closer look, lacks quite a lot of the basic features that you need
to make use of its 20GB memory.
It plays MP3s and WMA files and has a line-in capability and is expandable using an
SD memory card.
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The player has an excellent sound, and sports a touch screen to control most of its
features. The screen is only moderately responsive and is difficult to trigger
accidentally, so although there is a hold switch this rarely needs to be
employed.
The display is a square mono-colour 128x128 LCD screen which can display six track
titles at a time.
File transfer is rapid and the player comes with playlist editing software which is
very poorly designed. File navigation on the player is a bit slow at the best of times.
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NAVIGATION
Buttons
Navigation is done by a touch sensitive screen which has seven options: Up, Down,
Forward, Back, Menu, Select and Play.
As long as you touch the correct point the player responds, but as it can take more
than 5 seconds for the player to respond after a touch, things can get mighty
confusing.
File Navigation
Music navigation is done by MP3 tags – artists, albums, tracks, year and genres or
playlists.
You can go through a long list by selecting a specific initial alphabet letter, but
like most aspects of operation on the Ibusbi, this happens at a slow pace. The touch
screen decides of its own accord if and when and how quickly it responds to a
press.
When browsing large lists of MP3s, you can scroll either at one track at a time or keep
the arrow keys pressed to get a slightly faster scroll rate.
There is no progress bar and it seems to take from January to December to scroll
through a very long playlist.
There is no way to navigate using folders.
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DISPLAY
The LCD screen more or less does the job when it comes to track or menu
navigation and displaying track details during playback.
The backlit LCD display has the advantage of being reasonably easy to read in most
light conditions.
SOUND
The sound quality is excellent – and there is a small range of equalizer settings plus
a customizable setting.
The earphones are comfortable and sound fairly good.
PLAYBACK
During playback, fast forwarding and rewinding happens at a variable speed.
It takes about 8 seconds to get to the middle of a 4 minute song, and about 1 minute to
scan to the middle of a 1 hour podcast.
There is sometimes a 5 second pause or longer as the player moves from one track to the
next, so the Ibusbi cannot really be used to listen to audiobooks with the standard 3
minute tracks as these 5 second pauses become eventually very distracting.
DATA TRANSFER and SOFTWARE
Data transfer and battery recharging is done via USB using a standard USB cable.
The initial charge is 10 hours and this gives at least 12 hours of music
playback.
Recharging takes 2-3 hours, and the speed of data transfer is fairly impressive using
the Jockey software which is provided.
The Jockey software allows for playlist creation, but this is painstaking
work which requires that you search through the entire 20GB worth of files to find the
ones you want, create a playlist to transfer them to and then sort the files into the
order you want in the playlist, one track at a time.
The playlist order arranging cannot be done using a select and drag procedure – you
select an individual file and then press a button to move it up or down a place.
Playlists must be saved before exiting the software otherwise all that work is
lost.
This software is really quite inadequate for managing the files on a 20GB device so you
can only realistically expect to use of a fraction of that storage space.
BATTERY
Battery life is reasonable. A full charge will give more than 12 hours playback.
Recharging is done via the standard USB cable. It takes about 3 hours for a full
charge.
OTHER FEATURES & CONCLUSION
The player includes an SD card slot and has the ability to record line-in input and has
a microphone for voice recording.
There is a section repeat button which allows for chosen sections of a track to be
played repeatedly.
The player is quite heavy at 150g and has a sturdy angular case.
The most attractive feature – the 20GB of storage space is nearly impossible to use
properly unless you have a huge number of albums with unusually accurate, consistent
and complete MP3 tags.
The absence of a realistic playlist editor or the ability to navigate by folder
seriously limits the player’s usefulness.
The touch-screen is a fancy idea, but like many other aspects of this
player it is not up to the expected quality.
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Plays:
MP3, WMA
USB rechargeable internal battery with DC charging option.
Unresponsive, Heavyweight, Dud
LITREV Rating 2/5
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