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| Product: MPFit |
Company: EasyBuy2000 |
| Web: www.easybuy2000.com |
Phone: 877-505-4689 |
| Platform: CD-R/CD-A |
SRP: US$109
Street Price: same |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
Gigantic. Bulldog-ugly. Those are the first two things that come to mind as you take the MPFit out of its box. Once in hand, the next thing you think is: Gawd, how CHEAP! Everything smacks of bargain-basement Asian electronics. You know the feeling. The tacky design, the sense that they didn't spare an extra nanometer of material (at least on anything important), the stiff, clunky buttons, the bare-bones, barely-English instructions and minimal, cheesy box art. They can't even decide what to call the thing (variations in the material include "mp fit," "mpfit," "MPFIT," "mpFit," and "MPFit"). It's around this time that the US$109 you spent, which seemed like a bargain for an MP3 player, starts to feel like maybe too much money.
The MPFit is one in a line of MP3 CD players being sold through Easybuy 2000. We bought our son the cheaper MPTrip for Christmas (@ $88), but returned it when it turned out to skip badly (see reference to cheap electronics above). We decided to trade up to an MPFit because it had some better features (like an LCD title readout).
This picture doesn't do it justice.
It's A LOT uglier in person!
MP3 CD players are all the rage these days. Simply described, they allow you to play CD-Rs with native MP3s burned onto them, as well as regular audio CDs. You can load up to ten hours of MP3 tunes onto a single CD-R, so for the price of the players (all much cheaper than other flavors of MP3 devices), and the low cost of the media, this technology looks promising (especially since many people already have CD-R burners at home or work). The MPTrip was one of the first MP3 CD players available, and the entire line sold by Easybuy 2000 (shouldn't they upgrade their name for the 21st century?) is still the cheapest going.
The MPFit is SO huge. It's about twice as thick as a conventional portable CD player. It's so big, it's impractical to carry on your belt (you think your PDA looks geeky!). It has bizarre "Cyber-Look" styling, which basically means it has a bunch of useless silver dimples, puckers and rubber bumpers on it to make it look more "futuristic." It has a giant rubber hinge in the back and an equally gigantic OPEN button on the front (that's difficult to work). The volume button is a long semi-circle that you press at either end to control. Other control buttons circle the small LCD display in the center of the lid. Around the sides of the unit is a hold button, DC jack, the remote input, mic input, audio out and headphone jacks.
The remote is certainly the coolest features on the MPFit. Just like more expensive CD players, it's a tethered remote with the basic control functions and an LCD display on the end of cable that plugs into the player (your headphones plug into it). Of course, since this unit is more "transportable" than "portable," the remote is less useful than it could be. It's still nice to have if you're, say at a desk, and too lazy to reach for the unit to change tracks. The remote is also much easier to read than the LCD on the unit. The data along the outside edge of the display window is tiny and hard to discern without holding the player up to your face.
The built-in recording feature lets you record short audio messages (about 8 minutes worth), but you have to supply your own mic, and again, the bulkiness makes this more of a bell and/or whistle than a useful feature. The MPFit has a rechargeable battery circuit -- a nice feature -- but you have to supply your own (2) AA rechargeable Ni-Cds.
So with all of my criticisms above, how well does it do its job? Good, but not great. The sound is definitely "you get what you pay for." Listening between our $100 Sony CD Discman and the MPFit, there's a discernable difference. MP3s sound about the same as on my computer, but the audio CDs definitely don't sound as good as they do through the Discman. Bit rates on MP3s can't exceed 196Kbps and the sample frequency can be no less than 32KHz. You can navigate through directories of MP3, although navigation can be cumbersome if you have a lot of directories/subdirectories. Navigation is definitely not intuitive.
MP3 CD is certainly promising technology that uses the tools and resources that many of us already have to bring down the cost of MP3 storage and portable playback. The mysterious makers of the MPTrip and MPFit (EasyBuy is just a reseller -- it's not even clear what country the devices are made in) should get credit for getting the ball rolling and for making MP3 CD pricing competitive. But now that players such as Rio are getting in the game (with their recently announced Rio Volt for $170), you're probably much better off spending a few more bucks to get out of the gizmo ghetto or waiting until the prices of better-quality units start to fall.
- Gareth Branwyn [2/28/01]
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