Let me just start by saying that this player is great value. It's small, quite nicely designed (mirrored backplate is quite reminiscent of the iPod) and the general workings of the menu system is not as awful as some I've used.

Now that I've said that, let me start to pick on the real problems with this device. The biggest and most annoying is the directory list. Okay, so people have been having problems with this (myself included) and although it's easily solved, it still feels like the firmware is very amateur. I mean, they misspelled 'Create' (spelling it as 'creat') which is a bit ridiculous considering that the option to 'creat list' appears EVERY time you add files to this.

So, you've encountered this problem and finally solved it. You get a directory list. Oh... it's not sorting the folders by name. No, you guessed it (no, you didn't) they're sorting the folders by DATE ADDED, rather than NAME (I mean, why bother with logic? Who the hell is going to be searching… more »

Let me just start by saying that this player is great value. It's small, quite nicely designed (mirrored backplate is quite reminiscent of the iPod) and the general workings of the menu system is not as awful as some I've used.

Now that I've said that, let me start to pick on the real problems with this device. The biggest and most annoying is the directory list. Okay, so people have been having problems with this (myself included) and although it's easily solved, it still feels like the firmware is very amateur. I mean, they misspelled 'Create' (spelling it as 'creat') which is a bit ridiculous considering that the option to 'creat list' appears EVERY time you add files to this.

So, you've encountered this problem and finally solved it. You get a directory list. Oh... it's not sorting the folders by name. No, you guessed it (no, you didn't) they're sorting the folders by DATE ADDED, rather than NAME (I mean, why bother with logic? Who the hell is going to be searching for artist names with an mp3 player anyway?). Let me point out that I am being only SLIGHTLY sarcastic in my parenthesis text here.

Well, that makes no real sense overall. Date added? I mean, okay it might be fine if you add single albums or only plan on having 3-4 albums on it (why bother with an 8GB player though? hmm?) but if you're like me, you're going to whack on about 50 at a time. Okay, so maybe that still wouldn't be a HUGE problem if there wasn't a very annoying lag when selecting things, oh and considering you only get about 4-5 albums per screen, you're going to be enjoying a veritable clickfest each time you want to find that album you added about 3 weeks ago.

Oh, and don't expect any firmware update to save the day. I asked on the support forums and was quite blankly told that they only release updates for major issues (like the player turning on and off). Apparently user experience wasn't very high on their list of priorities.

Now, I'm no GUI designer/programmer/firmware writer but I think if they can list directories by date added then it would be VERY easy to simply make the directory list alphabetical.

The only other issue I can state is that the backlight is very uneven and there is no shuffle option. Neither of these are a big deal though considering the price of this.

Well, that's enough of that. It's not all bad with this little guy, though. Like I said, it's small and light. It's relatively nicely designed. It sounds okay. I mean, I'd be very pleased with it without these issues.

The conclusion is that if you really only listen to a whole album at a time then you'll probably not complain about this directory list issue. I mean, it'll take a minute to find the album, but then you're fine. If you're like me, you might fancy a bit of this, then a bit of that and, well, that's where you'll be entering a world of pain.

I decided to write this simply because it didn't even occur to me before buying this, that they'd list the directories this way. I was expecting a cheap and cheerful interface but instead I got cheap and stupid.

Good and bad!