Lexar Media Digital Music Player 512 LDP-600

Rating:
Summary: Lexar LDP-600 Media Player
Review: I bought this player from J & R. It was a present for my wife.
Because it was a present, I missed the ability to return this crap to J & R. They only give you two weeks.

The most serious problem is that the player crashes all the time. It is also very difficult to reset the player once it crashes. My wife has to carry a needle to the gym so she can reset this stupid player every time it crashes.

Lexar is impossible to contact for a return authorization.

Other problems include a poor method of carrying the player. The lanyard around the neck is an incredibly poor design. I assumed one could tighten the fit around the neck, but no. It hangs down around her belly button and swings around all over the place: real intelligent.

Navigation through the songs can crash the player. You have to pray before scrolling through your songs. There is no way to quickly jump to a song that you want. If you are on song #5 and you want to get to song #120, good luck. There is no way to get there. And then there is the poor design of the menu system. You have to arrange your songs in various folders during your computer interface. Then, on the player, you have to either choose one folder or all folders to play. If you choose one folder, you can't switch to a different folder unless you go back into the menu...very tedious.

And the player is booby-trapped. If you switch from the radio to the player, and you don't hold the "record" button long enough, you will record off the radio instead of switching back to the player. Then when you do finally make it back to the player, it will play the song you just recorded from the radio and actually change any settings you previously selected from the menu. It is an incredibly stupid machine with poor navigation, poor design, lack of basic functionality, and extremely annoying.

Rating:
Summary: Bad product there a better options.
Review: I own a jetaudio G3 now so this is a comparison.
Pros.
-SD expansion slot for cards up to 1GB in capacity. (One of the reasons why this player had my attention)
-Well built sturdy material, better than the G3 and the looks is better at least to me.
Is made of a rubberized material that is soft to the touch, not slippery and can absorb more impacts if falling, etc
-Excellent LCD screen, very readable even with no backlight on, is clearer than the G3 but not as clear as my Casio watch.
-FM transmitter, while I didn't bought this unit for that feature, for some people this might be something useful, in fact it seems that who made this device got too exited around the FM transmitter idea to the point of forgetting other more essential features. Basically the FM transmitter will suck a good deal of batt juice and the quality is not good.
-FM recording and Voice recording are best than G3, is quite unusual but this player saves in the WMA format, but the compression quality is really good, For voice there are three quality selections Low, Medium and High (which are 32, 64 and 96Kbps respectively) even at the 32Kbps low setting the voice recording were good, better than the G3. For FM recording there is no selection so it records only in WMA 96Kbps, but the quality is better than G3 MP3 128Kbps.
-Relatively low price, around $130 (online-shipped in the US) for the 512MB model.
-Fast boot-up time, way faster than the G3, to the point that in not really an issue.

CONS:
-The player won't resume where it left off and it defaults always to the internal memory segment (the SD and internal memory are not integrated), so to get it to play the music in the SD card you have to press the incredible amount of 12 times!!! digging through menus, provided you don't made a mistake. This is a total joke, when I encountered this I immediately thought that this player has no chance at all, what was Lexar thinking !!!!!
-Bad sound quality, the sound simple clips or distort when the music goes out of range, more obvious using the EQ modes.
-There is no real bookmarks but something that is similar to playlist in G3 but is badly implemented.
-The battery is internal and no replaceable, so if you use this thing frequently, the recharging chore will add to the bulk of errands you have in your busy life. For me rechargeable/removable AA is the way to go.
-Navigation is done using two horizontal levers similar to the ones in the iA5 with a click down. I found that overall is really cumbersome and hard to navigate, I liked better the joystick and navigation in the G3, it is miles ahead.
-The manual is incomplete, so it leaves the user wondering about many features and functions, this is totally inexcusable and reflects how lousy the people who made this gadget was.
-Support ? which support, there is no firmware upgrades web site or better manual, all that you have is the e-mail and phone support. By the way I contact support and they respond after one day to let me know that there is no plans to support OGG Vorbis with this player.

So Back to the store is going.
After trying this stuff, I realized how bad things can go, so I appreciate better now how good the G3 is.
Don't be fooled by the specs this player is a no no.