Rio 600SE 64MB MP3 Player

All important sound quality is excellent!

The original PMP300 was good, but this is an even better player, fully supported by Windows XP and Media Player. Good bass definition and nice features like playlist setup and track delete all on the player itself. The USB interface is very fast - a typical track takes 5 seconds to download (about 10-15 if you convert from MP3 to WMA). Good battery life - even with the LCD screen - which has a nice blue backlight and displays track name and all the running time info.

Downsides: The battery compartment cover is a bit fiddly and flimsy.
The cool wrap-over-ear headphones supplied with it broke last week.
It's quite hard to see through the oval shaped window over the LCD screen.

THe player is not a giant big brick that need cementing into a wall, it is about the size of the Nokia 8210 (its steady shape is great).

64mb get up to 2 hours of near cd quality music, just enough for me. The hard part i found with it was getting the software to work properly. Once you have installed it off the disk you need to load songs onto it, i had a problem getting the hardware to communicate with the software. This was fixed but if you're not stupid like me then you will realise that your USB connection is not the problem, the options of the software are! Before anything you need to fix your options and specify your audio player and what type of files it can hold e.g. MP3, WMA.

Trust me, if you want a good quality, reliable and handy mp3 (digital audio player) get this!

Overall i have rated this a 5-star - easy hardware, basic software, a gem of a player!

The player is much smaller than I had thought (which is a good thing) and is perhaps the size of a standard mouse (the hardware, not the animal of course...). The headphones are kind of strange to get used to, with the over-ear clips making the earpieces rub against the outer surface of your ear slightly although this is not too noticable after a while. They are excellent, though, for activities such as off-road cycling, jogging or any other kind of activity which involves a lot of movement as they are bolted right onto your ears.

The sound quality is fairly good as long as you keep the music files at a good 128 kbps and upwards. At 96kbps there is slight quality loss on the bassier side of things. The sound tends to concentrate on the treble a bit, resulting in a slightly harsh, tinny sound on some songs where there is a great deal of high pitched instruments which can often drown out the basslines, although you can pretty much rectify this with the Bass/Treble adjustment screens.

The material case included is quite well designed, although the plastic window is slightly too low and blocks off a fraction of the screen when inside it, although the track titles and important information are still visible (this is more of an irritation than an inconvenience).

Thankfully it supports both Windows Media Audio (.wma) and MP3 (.mp3) formats and these can be mixed onto the same memory space.

One excellent feature I have noticed is the sheer economic nature of battery consumption. The guy sitting next to me with his Discman ate his way through about 8 batteries on the whole of the trip. My single battery was worn down only to 99% energy after a good few hours listening, this was the latest type of Duracell AA battery by the way.

The "Hold" feature allows you to disable functioning of the buttons so that you can stash the player in your pocket and any kind of accidental pressage of the front buttons won't skip the track, stop or pause it or adjust any settings involuntarily which is excellent when combined with the random track player so you can turn it on and forget about the player while exercising or whatever you're doing.

I think the player is a great little device and is dead simple and handy for the music lover and fitness enthusiast. A must buy if you're a first time electronic music player buyer.