iVO Sound M400 MP4 Digital Player

Brand: Bay Consumer Inc.

Features:

iVO MP4 1 GB Digital Media Player General Features: Sleek silver design Compact and portable style
USB interface Huge 1.5-inch TFT LCD display 1 GB built-in memory
MPEG4 support and AMV format for animation files available Fast forward and fast rewind supported
Supports MP3 and WMA playback Voice recording Built-in FM tuner Digital album supports JPEG
Supports E-Book and .TXT files

Customer Reviews:

Decent technology; marginal usability/interface [Posted on 2007-02-06]
This is one of a group of no-name MP3+MP4 (video) players that share similar appearance and software. They come from somewhere in the Chinese electronics underground. They bury decent technology beneath user interfaces that range from "OK but duct-taped-together" to awful. They're definitely tempting values: This one plays music, photos, and videos off a 2 GB flash drive, while costing less than many 1 GB audio-only players.

This one's interface is OK/usable -- unlike the UI on its hopeless "Kaser/YoFun" cousin which I bought before it. This one uses decently (but not entirely) consistent key assignments. Its skip-track keys are placed nicely far away from its volume keys (but are not recessed, so you might press them accidentally). The volume keys face in intuitive directions, but it's too easy for your thumb to accidentally press the voice-recorder button opposite them.

It has a shuffle-folder play mode, but it's not properly pseudo-random: you sometimes get adjacent repeats. The lags between tracks are tolerable. Lags while navigating the folder tree, or between displayed photos, are annoyingly long. Most of the display uses an amateurish Courier font, because they forgot to build in anything more attractive.

MP3 sound quality, radio tuning and sound quality, and voice-recording quality are all good. It's at least backed by a real vendor, with a real e-mail address and U.S. phone number.

Its main flaw is that it has a square (rather than rectangular) screen -- and it distorts photos and videos anamorphically (rather than cropping or letterboxing them) to fit them onto it. Not sure if a future firmware upgrade might fix this. Also, it has dual headphone jacks (nice) but no audio line-in jacks.

As an alternative, Creative's Zen Nano and Muvo MP3 players are simple and very usable. They work wonderfully, until a few weeks after their warranties expire -- at which point they crumble.

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