I chose this 8gb Coby because I was looking for some way to carry my music around without bowing to King Apple by default. This product seceded in providing me a legitimate alternative to the ominous iPod series, but in giving me something I absolutely loved, it failed. It had a couple big problems and a thousand little things that left me torn on whether it was worth the $100 I spent for it.
Pros:
It looks cool.
Nice big screen.
The touch screen is a nifty feature.
I like the versatility of the unit. It can carry music, pictures, video, text and it has a radio.
It has dedicated volume buttons on the side. With iPods you use the wheal to adjust the volume, but only when the screen is on the song playing. So, if you want to crank it up while you're scrolling through other music, you've got a problem.
The drag and drop function makes transferring music a snap, forget the hassle of dealing with iTunes.
Cons:
BATTERY:
The first thing I noticed is the dismal battery life, about 3 to 4 hours. That could never ever stand up to iPod's 24 hours.
TOO SMALL:
Before I even had it, I couldn't find anywhere that sold the 16gb version. With the 8, I felt like I had no breathing room.
NO ALBUM ART:
This is nitpicking, buts it's pretty dumb when half of the screen is devoted to the album art if it won't even display it. Out of my 50 some odd albums only 5 or 6 of them showed the pictures.
LYRIC RECOGNITION:
The lyric recognition is a joke. Plain and simple, it doesn't work. I fiddled with it and fiddled with it and just concluded it was a publicity stunt.
USB:
I had heard about this problem on a couple other mp3 players. It charges through USB, so, your computer has to be on for it to charge. Also, the USB chord is about 6 inches long, and my USB port is about 10 inches off the ground. That leaves just enough room for the player to stand on the top end without the player dangling by the chord.
PICS AND VIDS:
It plays videos and pictures alright, but it's agonizingly slow. When I would go into the picture section, it would be a good 30 to 40 seconds before the pictures would come up. Same with video. Once I told it to play a video, it would take forever for it to start.
NAVIGATION:
I've already stated my dislike of iPod's wheel, but on this thing navigation is downright obtuse. You scroll down lists of songs one page at a time with the flick of a finger, but this seemingly simple action becomes way too complicated, because sometimes the highlighted song goes from the top to the middle, so if you flick your finger in the middle of the screen to make it keep going down, it will play that song instead. So you end up flicking higher or lower than the song selected, and then you have to compensate for the lake of room with the speed of the flick, and half the time, the selected song goes up to the second place you flicked, and so you have to flick AGAIN to make it go down! In addition, the commands for the page scrolling seem to be calibrated the exact opposite of each other, what the people at Coby didn't think of is that the thumb doesn't move up the same way it moves down. To scroll down, you go from the side of the screen to the bottom of the screen, to go up you go from the side of the screen to the top of the screen. The second is harder than it sounds and the result is an awkward motion that usually makes me either do it just with the other hand, or hold the player differently to go up. The other thing about the navigation is, if you go to press a song to select it, and press in between songs, it goes crazy and scrolls down to the next page.
HEADPHONE JACK:
The headphones that come with it aren't very impressive, so I used my own. With the Coby buds, the wire comes straight out of the metal thingy and on up to the speakers. With my buds and a lot of others, the wire comes out of the metal thingy at an "L" shape. Now, when the volume on the player was turned up past a certain level, a little past half way, the play back would be staticy and broken, IF, the "L" shape wasn't twisted in the jack so that the long part of the "L" and the wire, were pointing perpendicular to the face of the screen. In other words, on a flat surface the wire would be pointing straight up. If was like that I could turn it up a few more notches without any static, but any further and I would have had to press the metal thingy in the jack harder and hold it there. This is extremely annoying when you're in a car, because with the tire noise and other people in the car it has to be turned up a good deal past the half way point to hear it, much less rock out...
CONCLOSION:
Bottom line, the battery thing, the navigation thing and the headphone jack thing are the issues that made me decide to send it back. Amazon was great, I got a full refund, so in the end it was a good way to learn my lesion about buying off brand products. In the end though, it's not a terrible product. If you are just looking for something to get you buy and are willing to sacrifice quality to save some money, this will do just fine.
Get more detail about Coby 8 GB Flash MP3 Player with 3-Inch Color LCD, FM and Touch Screen Control (Black).
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