Well I have dragged this thing with me all weekend, and I am not very happy with it.
The thing is this: it tries to be an mp3 player and a portable harddisk, which was the whole reason I bought it, but it ends up doing neither very well.
As a portable harddisk, it has the benifit of acting as a standard enclosure, so you can stick any laptop IDE hardrive in it. But on the downside, it needs the adapter to be plugged in, if you want to do actually connect it to a pc.
It also uses one of those mini-usb connectors on the device itself. Now that is not nessesarily a problem, but a normal usb connector is more standard, and would be handier.
As an mp3 player it basicly sucks. It has no playlist functionality at all, it cant pause any mp3 without turning the whole device off, it cant play directory trees, forcing me to manually select any mp3 I want to play, the volume is controlled by the main buttons, which I cant possibly reach while the device is in its hip-bag. Also the stereo plug sticks out of the bag at an impossibly ackward angle. All in all, it makes a very lousy mp3 player.
Now the whole reason I considdered bying the thing in the first place, is cause I needed a decent mp3 player that could store all my music, but I also needed a portable hard drive. I didn’t see much sense in bying two seperate devices, like an ipod, and then another harddrive in a standard usb2 enclosure.
Up till now, I have been playing my mp3’s on my XDA, but this has two limitations that have started to grow into major fucking annoyances: 1. I will never have the storage I need for my daily dose of podcasts and some music on the side, and 2. The XDA doesnt have a standard 3.5mm stereo connector, it has a 2.5mm stereo/mic connector, for the handsfree set you got with it (the XDA is also my phone). Now I have long since wanted a decent headset or earbuds to listen to the podcasts/music with, and this has been problematic with the XDA.
On the upside, the XDA is a lot handier , if I only want to listen to podcasts, (my daily dose fits nicely on my 512 sd card), and only if I have the proper 2.5mm stereo/mic handsfree set, (but my current one, which is in fact the handfree set of the XDAII, is broken).
PocketPC 2002 Phone Edition deals with this nicely, as incoming calls mute the sound automaticly, and I dont have to switch headphones or anything.
In actuality, I would want a phone with a 3.5mm plug, and then a 3.5mm stereo harndfree set with an awnser button and volume control on the wire, but this is very very rare, or at least I have not been able to find this.
Or even better: how about a setup where I have no wires at all. Where I have a bluetooth headset that basicly does everything (stereo, microphone, awnser button, volume control), and where I can dynamicy switch between a blue-tooth enabled phone, and my bluetooth enabled portable harddrive. This must exist, now all I need to do is find it.
(To this end: I also need to get a new phone. I’m still kinda waiting for the MDA4 :D )
Anyhow. I will be sending the VP3320 back. Shame. I dont send back things often.. in fact I dont think I ever have, my purchasing decisions are usually better informed than this.
Below pictures are thumbnailed
(harddrive was purchased seperately by me)
Print | posted on Monday, June 27, 2005 1:01 AM