Amazon.co.uk Review
As digital music players offer more and more features and get more complicated to use, the MP-F50 MP3 Player goes the simple route: it's small and light and it just plays MP3 files. If you only want to play MP3s without listening to the radio or carrying around reminders, this little player does just that, which makes it very simple to use. Four buttons on the front and the volume control on the side give you clear controls, with an LCD to show the volume, track length and other details like which of the four equaliser settings (normal, jazz, rock and classical) you've selected. Oddly enough, it shows you what bit-rate each track was encoded at but doesn't have space to show the track name. That may not be a problem as there's only 32 MB of memory: if you want more than half-an-hour of music you'll need to pick lower-quality tracks or get hold of a separately available SmartMedia Card and insert it in the expansion slot on the back. With an affordable 64 MB SmartMedia card you can effectively treble your music storage capacity.
The USB cable makes it fast to transfer music to the player and while it's copying files the player takes power from the USB port. That will make the single AA battery last longer: you should get several days' use from it, depending on how long you listen for. The MPMan Manager software is simple to use too: you can see your hard drive, the internal memory and the SmartMedia card if you've fitted one all together, so it's easy to drag files onto the card or the player. You can't copy files back to your PC, for copyright reasons. The ear-bud headphones give a clear, bright sound with a surprising amount of volume for such a compact and lightweight player: you won't notice you've got it in your pocket. If you want a simple MP3 player without breaking the bank, the MP-F50 won't weigh you down. --Mary Branscombe