In Russian, the word "eBay" sounds close to "ebat", a rude one for "to f*ck". The expression to shop "
on eBay" gives even more convincing "na ebai", meaning to "get youself f*cked". So it's basically
"
you've been pwned".
In a wild hunt to replace my iPhone 3g 16gb (hate itunes! hate jail!) till I get a nokia N900 for a reasonable price, I bought a
32GB Touch Screen MP3 MP4 MP5 RMVB Media Player FM ZT32
player off Ebay for 49.99$ shipping included.
Here's the listing:
http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/2...enmp3mp4mp.jpg
Of course, it is a hacked player. The actual memory size is around 4Gigabytes.
BTW, found an easy way to test a hacked player:
1) use any filemanager with transfer speed indication (I use Far Manager)
2) select a mass of files for say 8GB and start copying it to the device
3) the moment transfer speed jumps from 3-4mb/s to 25-30 mb/s is where the physical flash ends and the player starts to copy to /dev/null
Here's our hero:
http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/3299/321p.jpg
It's a Rockchip RK27xx player. The battery indicator works, the audio speaker works, but I cannot set time. It also remembers file position (good for audiobooks).
It doesn't brick or hang if you copy over 4gb, the files are just not accessible (however visible in the filetable and can be copied to HDD as zeros).
The things I didn't like is there's no fast listing, so when you have 600 mp3s it's kinda annoying to navigate through them one by one. Same way you can't just tap of the scrollbar to go to a specific location in a song or a movie. You can click on the progress bar in movies and mp3 and even radio, it visually moves, but doesn't jump to the point.
The video playback is quite nice, it even played a 704x384 movie without problem. A 1.7GB avi without conversion!
It doesn't have problems with Cyrillic fonts, which is music to my ears.
The LCD is rather stylus-screen than touch-screen, but responsive anyway. Bright, with good angles. Then it is on, there's an audible hissing sound, probably from the illumination circuits.
The player can be operated while connected to a power source (i.e. when data pins of the USB are not used), which is crucial for me as I plan to use it in home theater.
Recording works okay. It stores wavs, mono 11khz.
Ebooks are stored in .txt. The codepage must be ANSI. For Russian, I had to switch to Russian menu language which is frustrating. In English interface, Cyrillic symbols in books are shown as Chinese.
Russian Mp3 tags will also be Chinese, however, and file names are displayed ok. When Russian interface language set, Cyrillic is displayed OK.
Radio module is quite powerfull and clean. But it shuts off when you go out of the radio applet. So you can read books while listening to mp3s, but not radio.
Anyway, that's a decent player, but not 32GB which could store all my music of some 20gbs and leave space for the future.
Of course I was so frustrated, I actually talked the seller to a complete refund without returning the player.
The seller's name is
bestall, his paypal account is
wujiarun88@gmail.com
So now I have a free player to brick.
Removing the memory hack is quite easy.
I followed
Random667 and
Skinski solutions (thank you guys) with some slight changes.
So that's what you've got to do:
1) Use Check Flash 1.10
2) selected the drive, selected as a “physical device”, Selected “low level initialization”. Hit Start.
3) In the new window, you should see 4 empty partitons!
Select the 0 (zero) one.
4) Click new, and create a FAT32 partition of 3.84GB
5) After finishing with CheckFlash, format the drive in Windows (I use XP)
Viola!
Questions left:
1) A way to get some fast listing and touch-the-scrollbar navigation?
2) How to fix clock and date?