Joybee 120 MP3 Player, 256MB, Silver (DA120-256MB-Silver)

Rating:
Summary: Good value for money
Review: I just bought this Joybee 120 last week, and so far it's been great. I find that iPod's are still just too expensive, nor do I feel the need to carry around 30+ Gigs of music with me all the time. That's what my computer is for!! I can fit about 80 songs onto this 256MB model (high-quality mp3's, I'm sure you could fit more at a lower quality or different format). That is enough for me, it makes a nice big playlist of music that will last me at least a week before I get bored.

For me, this player had all the features I wanted: reasonably large capacity, FM radio (with preset feature), rechargeable battery inside the unit (recharges via the USB port), equalizer settings, a good backlight, and a microphone. You can also record from the radio if you like.

The interface is pretty easy to use once you get used to it... my only beef is that the Joybee turns itself off really quickly if you pause or stop play temporarily (in about 1 minute). It can get a little annoying having to turn it back on, but it's probably just a battery save feature or something. Also, the volume control is found within the menus, which is sort of annoying, but I just have the internal volume set to max all the time, and use a set of earphones that have a manual volume control on the wire - I recommend doing this, it's a lot easier and besides, the earbud phones that BenQ gives you are pretty uncomfortable anyway.

As for transferring songs onto the player, I find it's very easy... I didn't bother installing the provided BenQ software, I just connected it via USB and it popped up on WinXP as a removable drive. You can just drag and drop your songs into the MP3 folder that appears - it's really easy and fast. No problems there so far; just make sure the battery has some juice left in it before transferring, otherwise I think it might not link up properly.

Overall, it's a good product so far - plus it's REALLY small, I have it clipped onto my belt (it comes with a belt-clip carry case), and it looks like a tiny little pager. It's really good value for your money, you get a lot of features. The Lithium battery life seems pretty decent as well, and I like that you don't have to mess around with buying AAA's all the time.

Not perfect, but highly recommended.