SmartDisk Flashtrax XT (40 GB) Digital Media Player
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- Number of Songs: 10000
- Usage: Music Video Recording Photo Viewing
- Interface: USB 2.0
- Screen Size: 3.6 inch
- Main Storage Type: Hard Drive
- Expansion Slots: CompactFlash Card
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Great little device. Cheaper than the archos.
Pros
Price, capabilites are great. Video player with 40gb cheaper than the archos.
Cons
Crude interface, picky on file types.
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Great little gadgete with a ton of features. Its a little picky on some files but when its correct it does a fantastic job. PVR!
I picked this unit up a few weeks ago and couldn't be happier. It does what I want it to do.
I have been looking to pick something like the Archos player for a while but couldn't justify to myself the prices they want. So one day I was just nosing around in CompUSA with a friend and found this on sale, managers special for $149. I asked for the box and reviewed the specs and decided for the price and it's capabilities I would give it a shot. I figured that for the price if it was a piece of junk I could gut it for the drive.
They rang it up and it ended up coming up for $109. Any second thoughts I had went out the window.
Got it home and charged it up for a while before playing with it. So far I've found the battery lasts a while, I've heard up to 6 hours but I never really have that much time to kill. Suffice it to say it just goes.
The screen is the same size as the one on my PDA so I am used to its size already. The navigation controls are well placed and, all in all, it feels well built.
The OS is a little crude but the features are easy to find and the controls easy to use. It's not really pretty but that isn't a big deal to me. The capacity is what gets me. Lots of space to screw around with. I got movies, music, and photos and still have room for more stuff.
The good.
It plays a lot of media formats. But it doesn't do all of them. It does MPEG4, divx 3/4/5 with mp3 audio, xvid 1.0, asf, Quicktime 6 MOV files (compressed in MPEG4, not old school .mov's) and WMV9 for video. It plays MP3, wma, M3U (playlist file), and something called 736 for audio. Pictures it can view are JPEG, GIF, ABM, and some RAW types. Suprisingly it also includes a radio tuner!
Now the audio section works well as it displays your IDF info, and use playlists. You can generate your own playlists as well. It's not great for audiobooks as there is no way to bookmark the files.
The screen is nice and displays the images well. It can do a slide show or you could manually flip your pictures around. The video playback is one of the main reasons to get this item. And it does play it back nicely. You can output it to TV with an enclosed cable, or ,suprisingly, record video and audio with the same cable. It acts as a PVR and does a good job of it.
It has a rudimentary file browser but any real work in the directories is best done in Windows Explorer. The usb 2.0 connection is nice and fast. So transferring your files over shouldn't take long at all.
Best of all you can just drag and drop your files onto the unit as it just appears as a disk drive. You can store all your files on it just like a thumb drive but with mad space. No conversion of your music is necessary. Better yet, unlike the iPod you can put your music on and then copy it back off again. Take that apple.
The interesting.
It acts as a PVR and can record from tv, dvd, vcr or any source that has regular rca connections. It has a FM tuner. It has the ability to record from the mic, tuner, and video in.
It was originally designed to be used to off load images from your digital camera and to that end has a CF card slot and a copy button for one touch copying. My camera uses xd and I haven't picked up an adapter to cf but that is a handy feature. You can also browse and play the various file types from a CF card the same as you can from the internal HD.
The bad.
I haven't managed to get any reception on the tuner but I'm not really concerned. I listen to XM anyway.
As many types of videos it plays it is missing out on simple ones like MPEG and MPEG2. If there is a codec mismatch there will be problems playing the file. It doesn't recognise anything lower than WMV9, and I have a bunch of WMV3 files so I'm out of luck unless I do a conversion.
The built in speaker is tiny so the sound isn't great. The sound through the headphones is great though. So is the output through line out.
As I mentioned the interface is crude but passable.
Summary.
Nice versatile unit. Great storage space. Does what it claims and does it well.
I have been looking to pick something like the Archos player for a while but couldn't justify to myself the prices they want. So one day I was just nosing around in CompUSA with a friend and found this on sale, managers special for $149. I asked for the box and reviewed the specs and decided for the price and it's capabilities I would give it a shot. I figured that for the price if it was a piece of junk I could gut it for the drive.
They rang it up and it ended up coming up for $109. Any second thoughts I had went out the window.
Got it home and charged it up for a while before playing with it. So far I've found the battery lasts a while, I've heard up to 6 hours but I never really have that much time to kill. Suffice it to say it just goes.
The screen is the same size as the one on my PDA so I am used to its size already. The navigation controls are well placed and, all in all, it feels well built.
The OS is a little crude but the features are easy to find and the controls easy to use. It's not really pretty but that isn't a big deal to me. The capacity is what gets me. Lots of space to screw around with. I got movies, music, and photos and still have room for more stuff.
The good.
It plays a lot of media formats. But it doesn't do all of them. It does MPEG4, divx 3/4/5 with mp3 audio, xvid 1.0, asf, Quicktime 6 MOV files (compressed in MPEG4, not old school .mov's) and WMV9 for video. It plays MP3, wma, M3U (playlist file), and something called 736 for audio. Pictures it can view are JPEG, GIF, ABM, and some RAW types. Suprisingly it also includes a radio tuner!
Now the audio section works well as it displays your IDF info, and use playlists. You can generate your own playlists as well. It's not great for audiobooks as there is no way to bookmark the files.
The screen is nice and displays the images well. It can do a slide show or you could manually flip your pictures around. The video playback is one of the main reasons to get this item. And it does play it back nicely. You can output it to TV with an enclosed cable, or ,suprisingly, record video and audio with the same cable. It acts as a PVR and does a good job of it.
It has a rudimentary file browser but any real work in the directories is best done in Windows Explorer. The usb 2.0 connection is nice and fast. So transferring your files over shouldn't take long at all.
Best of all you can just drag and drop your files onto the unit as it just appears as a disk drive. You can store all your files on it just like a thumb drive but with mad space. No conversion of your music is necessary. Better yet, unlike the iPod you can put your music on and then copy it back off again. Take that apple.
The interesting.
It acts as a PVR and can record from tv, dvd, vcr or any source that has regular rca connections. It has a FM tuner. It has the ability to record from the mic, tuner, and video in.
It was originally designed to be used to off load images from your digital camera and to that end has a CF card slot and a copy button for one touch copying. My camera uses xd and I haven't picked up an adapter to cf but that is a handy feature. You can also browse and play the various file types from a CF card the same as you can from the internal HD.
The bad.
I haven't managed to get any reception on the tuner but I'm not really concerned. I listen to XM anyway.
As many types of videos it plays it is missing out on simple ones like MPEG and MPEG2. If there is a codec mismatch there will be problems playing the file. It doesn't recognise anything lower than WMV9, and I have a bunch of WMV3 files so I'm out of luck unless I do a conversion.
The built in speaker is tiny so the sound isn't great. The sound through the headphones is great though. So is the output through line out.
As I mentioned the interface is crude but passable.
Summary.
Nice versatile unit. Great storage space. Does what it claims and does it well.
