Geeks.com sent over this nice mp3 player, an iPod Nano look alike. It costs just $35, which is a very fair price for 4 GB storage.

The device has a 1.7″ passive matrix color LCD, an FM radio with station bookmarking option, a speaker on the back side, a normal headphone jack, a microphone, a mini-USB interface for both data and recharging, and 5 buttons on the front. There is no “hold” button on the player, but instead the buttons are rigid enough to prevent accidental clicking in most cases.

The player supports mp3 and WMA audio files, and it also has support for JPEG picture viewing, an e-book, tel-book, and video player. Unfortunately, there is no documentation to tell us how to create and use the right formats the e-book, tel-book and video player. I tried both as WMV v8 and XViD at small resolutions/frame rate/bitrates, but nothing worked. The manual says nothing about what kind of videos exactly it supports which makes it impossible to guess it right.

The audio screens are pretty good, but dated in terms of design. Nevertheless, it supports an equalizer, replay, shuffle etc. Unfortunately, there is a buzzing noise when the audio interface is up or you listen to low-volume music. This usually happens when cheap electronics are used.

The overall speed of the device is good, although the flash storage is very slow. It took minutes to copy a few songs over, much slower even than USB 1.1. Battery life is pretty low too, just 4.5 hours compared to iPod Nano’s 24 hours (plus, the Nano is even thinner than this player). On the plus side, the power adapter it comes with has a full USB port, so you can use the same adapter to charge other devices too (in my case, a cellphone and a Kodak digicam).

Now, all things fair, the player does the job. It doesn’t have the good interface and usability design or better hardware of an Apple product, but then again it’s much, much cheaper and if you are not a person who wants perfection out of such a gadget, this player will suffice. I gave this player to my brother and he liked it anyway. He said he prefered it over his cellphone-based music entertainment while at work.

Rating: 6/10