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| Product: JamP3 MP3 Player |
Company:
KB Gear interactive |
| Web: www.jamonline.com |
Phone: N/A |
| Platform: PC or Mac |
SRP: US$85
Street Price: $13
(after $30 rebate) |
Cred Rating: | Special Award:
Road Kill |
I bought the JamP3 Player because it was so cheap -- only US$13 after a $30 rebate (I got mine for the pre-rebate price of $43 shipped from computergeeks.com). I was curious to see if a nearly disposable-priced MP3 player was worth the lost pocket change. With other players starting at $150, it also seemed like a fun way of scratching my gadget itch.
The JamP3 is about the size of a pack of cigarettes and fits
comfortably in your shirt pocket. It has a built-in belt clip that's
reasonably solid, and although the unit is made of plastic, it doesn't feel unreasonably cheap (with the exception of the battery door).
The JamP3's "out of box experience" leaves much to be desired. The
included software requires you to install MusicMatch Jukebox which then
attempts to take over all of your MP3 file associations. It's also not the full version of MusicMatch, so you keep getting pestered to upgrade -- it's nagware with the added insult that you *paid* for it.
Transferring songs to your MP3 player is as easy as ... oh wait ... it's NOT easy. First you have to start up the software and hook up a USB cable to the player. Then you have to screw around with the software for awhile as it drops the connection to the unit. You then have to turn the player off and on and restart the software. When successful, you're given a window where you must point to your MP3 files. The interface also shows you how many songs you can transfer to the player -- only about five will fit into its 16MB internal memory at a 128K bitrate. As an experiment, I uploaded some Evan Dando bootlegs at 96K and they sounded too poor even to my undiscerning ears. Despite USB, transferring songs is far from fast.
In addition to the poorly-designed software, there are a host of
other annoyances that hover around this gadget like hornets around a
Coke at a family picnic. When your batteries begin to fade, the included earbud headphones begin to fill with a horrible buzzing noise. Occasionally the unit will emit a popping sound when it's turned on and off, or as you switch between songs. There is no way to fast-forward through a song, either. The differences in the tone pre-sets (Rock, Normal, Jazz, Classical) are negligible. The included earbuds should be thrown in the garbage immediately. I found the inability to manipulate songs on the unit especially annoying after having used a Sharp MiniDisc recorder for over a year that lets you rearrange and delete tracks on the fly. Being stuck all day with a song I decide I can't stand until I can get back to my PC is a real drag.
Ultimately, you have to weigh these defects against the incredible low price of the JamP3 using Heasley's Law of Relative Frugality (tm) [see Nate's Compaq review]: The rating of a gadget is inversely proportional to how much you blew on it. Consequently, at $13 (provided my rebate ever shows up), I'd probably give this a 1.0 battery rating instead of a 1/2. Even though it's got a crappy interface and little memory, it's still expandable using MMCs (MultiMedia Memory Cards) and it's shockproof (so you can listen to it while you jog, ride your bike, or clean your carpets). I'll probably give this, with some better headphones, to my four-year-old Ezra to play with, or maybe mount it to my recumbent bike with an external speaker for some skip-proof tunes while I cruise. It was an interesting experiment and I got a new gadget to play with. If your needs for an MP3 player are really modest and you're flat broke, the Jamp3 might be worth a look. Otherwise, save your lunch money and get a real player, not this Fisher-Price special.
- Mark Crane [10/4/01]
Note: You can get the Rebate Coupon for the JamP3 rebatehere. It's good till the end of the year.
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