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The last truly portable audio device I had was an excellent Panasonic personal stereo. It was slimline, lasted several days on a single AA battery and had wonderful audio quality (as wonderful as tape players get anyway). Back when I was a student taking a 2.5 hour bus journey from home to University every day (and back again) this player was a life saver for me. I loved it. (Ah, the memories... Richie Sambora's excellent Undiscovered Soul album... Bruce Springsteen Live '75-85...great stuff). As time moved on and I got a job I invested in a new stereo for my home, a nice technics model with some excellent neon lights and first class sound. Really streets ahead of anything similar...it didn’t have a tape player though, and so as CD's came out I wasn’t able to transfer them to tape and portable music really ended for me. Yes I know there are personal CD players out there...but honestly, have you tried to find clothing that has huge pockets within earphone cable length of your ears???? They are just not practical (and don’t start me on battery life!!!)..How about one of Apple's trendy Ipods? Fine if you are willing to spend considerable money, but what about someone who's just wanting a device to kick about with? So tThat brings us up to today... it was with great excitement I accepted delivery of an Ultra 4 in 1 MP3 player.
The unit is a multi function device which is capable of being a USB hard drive, voice recorder, MP3 player and SD/MMC reader. Not bad for the $89.99 tigerdirect are asking for it (- $15 rebate). The unit itself is 9cm x 3.8cm x 2.3cm and weighs only 38 grams, amazingly light. The grey area which you can see on the pics above/below is plastic however the black area is tough rubber which gives it a good solid feel and makes it less easy to drop due to the additional grip rubber provides. On the front of the unit is the main control buttons surrounding the screen. The functions available are EQ, Mode, Play/pause, Stop (on and off), skip/fast forward and skip back/rewind. on the underside is a lock button which protects against accidental button presses and on the top are the volume up and down buttons.
With your Ultra MP3 4-in-1 you receive everything you need to get up and running (other than a PC of course :) ). The picture above shows the bundle contents which are MP3 4-in-one, Manual, driver CD, USB extension cable, battery and earphones. The CD included with the unit is a nice to have however its not needed if you have a decent OS like Windows XP, if this is the case its just plug in and play...windows has all the drivers required. The earphones included are quite novel, they are a cord which goes round your neck and the player dangles from it and the earphone wire is contained inside this cord for 50% of the length. In my experience I really felt like I was drowning in a mess of wires and cord and quickly moved to my trusty Sony earphones however my wife loved the cord idea and was happy to use it.... it would appear to be a real matter of personal taste. Also worth noting is the battery included which is a decent quality AAA battery (Energizer). All too often products are sent out with "Demonstration" or "Value" batteries, this little extra touch is something we have come to expect from Ultra's products and is a welcome addition.
Using the unit is a breeze, if you want to use the internal 128mb as a portable drive its a case of accessing it through "my computer" and just dragging/dropping files to it as you would any drive, very simple. The SD/MMC card (8mb-512mb) plugged into the Ultra 4-in-1 is accessed just as easily as it registers as a separate drive in "my computer" and again its drag/drop compatible. Voice recorder functions are a case of hitting record and talking then stopping record... in all 3 of these uses the unit is flawless and does exactly what is expected. MP3 playback is really the main use for anyone interested in this product though and in this respect the unit performs well and is very functional. We used Windows Media Player 10 to transfer our MP3 files and as hoped everything was a breeze. I plugged in the unit to the USB port and selected Sync within Media player. After selecting the files I wanted to transfer (Media player checks the device size and tells you if you exceed the limit) I pressed sync and within 2minutes the 128mb contained within the device was filled. In general usage the unit was flawless, EQ settings are suitably different (options are normal, Pop, Classic, Jazz and Rock) and the unit provides a very reasonable level of volume for those of you wanting to blast your ear drums with heavy metal. Access to each track contained on the device is instantaneous, it really is lightning fast and the actual quality of playback is very high indeed. Surprisingly the earphones contained in the bundle are decent quality and you'll find no issues there either. Battery life was suggested to be about 6hours on the single AAA battery however we managed well over 8hours from playback and general use, so this was another area that exceeded expectations. Finally for those of you interested in listening to music in the dark the screen is lit in blue neon from either side whenever its turned on or a button pressed. The level of lighting is fine (the pic below doesn’t do it justice though) for this use and so use of the unit is possible in the dark.
There's not much else I can say about the Ultra MP3 4-in-1, its a great little product. Easy to use, excellent build quality of all components, upgradability of storage and a decent battery life. This added to the good sound quality gives the unit almost everything the average user looks for. If I had to think of things to improve I'd like to see the LCD screen properly backlit or maybe even the facility to show track names on the LCD rather than just numbers however these are very minor things which don’t really detract from what is an excellent product.
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