I bought one of these players to use as an SD card "walkman", replaying time-shifted radio programmes, as recorded on my Pure DAB-to-SD card recorder, on my journey to and from work. I had been accustomed to using a PC to transfer these MP2 files to a pen-drive player, converting to MP3 en route and was pleasantly surprised to find that this player would play MP2 files as recorded on SD card without conversion or renaming to .mp3- something that I believe few MP3 players will do, despite the commonality between these two formats. This could make this player of interest to anyone owning one of the various DAB recorders made by Pure, Roberts and others- alright, transferring and/or converting files is straightforward and fairly quick but owning one of these cuts out firing up a PC and a few minutes of mouse-work each time.
The ubiquitous up/down/left/right/fire navigator button quickly becomes instinctive- to toggle between internal and card memory, push the button "up" for a few seconds. Note that the player always starts up in internal memory mode, even with an SD card in the slot. The use of a single, quickly changed AAA cell rather than an internal, captive Li-ion unit could be a plus point- Ni-MHs seem to last well. A minor niggle is the "plasticky" case- but, heck, you wouldn't expect or deserve CNC'd titanium at the price. The top two lines of the dot-matrix LCD are in a very fine script and, with the inevitable scuffing and scratching over time, could get difficult to read. If anything, these two lines offer a bit too much information in one go but a pat on the back to Alba for making the effort. All in all, a handy little gizmo. Buy now while stocks last.