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The Good the Bad and the outright Ugly

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notlistening:
Hey All,


Bit of research for the RockboxPlayer project to design and build a specific player for rockbox to run on.... if you didn't know.

Right i am after experiences opinion and anything else you might consider useful in regards to hardware, features, usability, longevity etc of player or devices you have owned used before.

What was good an why?

What was bad and why?

Anything outright ugly?

So I have owned a number of small devices, phones, handhelds, Mp3/4 players and each one in its own right was a joy and a complete killer to use / maintain. Some did their job well and other s tried to do everything but badly.

An example of the type of information i am after is, trying to keep it mp3/4 player related:

Sony Ericsson P800

On this device I loved the scroll wheel situated on the top left hand side if the phone. This scroll button was good because it felt sturdy and gave good feedback to let me know i had scrolled it. It also had the functionality of being a five way button: Click in, up, down, back and forwards.

This feature allowed me to navigate and use the phone without any other controls which was great.

I also liked the fact that in the seven years i had it I never had to replace the battery, and only because i dropped it did the fragile screen crack. That was ugly.

I also got fed up with having to have a custom cable to connect this device where ever I went.

iAudio X5

The bad for this device are the longevity of the hardware. I in the two year warranty had to get this replaced but to the battery life was useless with one year and the mini joystick control was not clicking down anymore. To be continued........ 
 
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(I fixed what looked like a typo:  ecamokle --> example)

bascule:
Rio Karma

The good was the clickable thumbwheel, via which almost every function on the player could be accessed, coupled with the comfortable way that it sat in the hand.
The good was also the excellent, intuitive and feature-rich firmware with good codec (i.e, Vorbis) support.
The good was making it natively networkable via the dock, allowing it to be used as a networked music drive.

The bad was the harware fragility, both the thumbwheel and the hard drive.
The bad was also the PC-side synch application which was flaky and didn't allow drag-and-drop access to the drive. The network client wasn't the best, either.

There was no ugly. I still haven't found a player as downright ergonomically excellent as the Karma. The Sansa comes a poor second, even when used upside-down, as I do.

Sansa e200

The good is the small, lightweight form factor (hurrah for flash-based players)
In common with the iPod nano, the good is also the scrollwheel. I find it a really intuitive and quick way to navigate menus.
An easily user-replaceable battery is also something that should be mandatory.

The bad is portrait-style screens. I feel DAPs benefit most from a landscape style, in order to better accomodate album and track titles without scrolling.
The bad is also placement of the scrollwheel. I find it really uncomfortable to use with one hand, as the player sits high in the hand and feels as if it's about to fall out. See above for (partial) solution. This also applies four-fold for the heavier, larger Gigabeat, I could just not get along with that player.

Basically, for me, the majority of my handheld gadget likes and dislikes come down to ergonomics and their effect upon the interface (in its widest possible sense). I had an old Nokia mobile with a monochrome screen which could be read without a backlight and needed one button to access most things. Now I have a new Nokia that came with my job that I detest; I have to move my thumb from button to button to achieve the simplest task and their effective interface design seems to have disappeared :(

* bascule goes off in a huff about poor physical interface design on multi-functional gadgets...

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