My 4gb Meizu Clone Review
On Thursday (the 15th), I received my 4gb meizu clone in the mail. I had no doubt that it was 4gb because signs were plastered all over the listing when I bought it insisting "no hacked." I admit, I was disappointed with its appearance out of the box. I hadn't expected it to be as good as the real meizu, of course, but it was basically a glacier with a different keypad and no removable battery. Same screen and interface. I turned it on. Firmware version 9.0.50. No graphics editing for now
. Anyway, down to the raw specs:
External appearance:
A bit disappointing for me, although it's a pretty sturdy player with a nice metal back that can also serve as a mirror. 2" TFT screen, easy-to-press keypad, and standard USB port. The keypad didn't look like what was advertised in the auction, but I can live with that. The thing that REALLY ticked me off, though, was the 2.5mm headphone jack. I mean, come on. I thought the manufacturers were through with those with the 1st gen nanoclones. And it's not like the player isn't thick enough to support it, so there was really no reason for that. And as I can't find my headphone adapter, I'm stuck with the cheap headphones they supplied me with for now.
External appearance overall: 6/10
Internal:
Ah, the magical 4gig player finally in my possession. Actually, it's not that great. I'll explain why later. 1st things first: I had to test if it was REALLY 4gigs. I hooked it up and opened mp3 utilities disk manager, did the low level format and slider test, and sure enough, it still read 3.914gigabytes. I was ecstatic. Then I proceeded to transfer my entire music library to the player. It took FOREVER, even though the computer recognized it as a 2.0 highspeed flash disk (I probably wasn't using the right USB port. Oh well). It took approximately 2 and 1/2 hours to transfer my music library alone, and what's worse, the player randomly disconnected from the computer during the middle of the transfer. Thinking everything was fine, I reconnected it and finished, only to discover that several files and folders had become corrupted and my player kept restarting. My first thought was, "Oh God it
is hacked." But I held on to the hope that it was just the USB connection problems, formatted the player, and started over. Yes, I was majorly frustrated. I left the computer on all night to finish the transfer. This time, thankfully, it worked. I copied the files in order, went backwards through the list, and thankfully nothing went wrong. I filled the rest of the capacity with videos, photos, and text files, disconnected and reconnected the player and received no errors. I was happy - temporarily. Turns out the 4gigs makes the
already slow actions chipset run even slower. It takes forever to browse files. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. I know you're itching for a picture for proof and I'm sorry but when I attempted to open the player, the screwdrivers I had wouldn't turn the screws and my player was getting scratched so I gave up. You'll just have to take my word for it.
Internal overall: 8/10 (minus 2 for slowness)
Features:
I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the features because mostly everyone knows the drill with these players already: Music, AMV video, FM radio, voice recording, photos...etc. Mine has all of these and does them pretty well. FM recordings still have annoying interference so I avoid using that feature. Photos are clear, video is pretty good at 208x176 pixels, and text is easy to read. I can't fully review the music because I'm using the cruddy earphones that came with the player (and sound horrible) until I find my adapter.
Features Overall:8.5/10
Everything Overall: 7/10
This is a genuine 4gb player, and the extra capacity is nice, but the slow processor limits my ability to enjoy the benefits of it. The 2.5mm headphone jack was also a huge turnoff because of its hassle. To be fair, though, everything functions as it's supposed to and the player runs with no hitches besides the slowness. But I've come to expect that with every actions chipset mp4 player. What I can't believe is that I won it for only $49.95 plus $19.78 shipping (only $69.73 in total!!!). When I wrote this before, taddad voiced his concern that it seemed too good to be true, but it really wasn't. I got what I paid for, and besides a few annoyances, it's great. Here is a link to the auction and pictures I took of it. Hope you enjoyed the review.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=110086240914
