[The Torminator]

Hi guys. Recently a DHL parcel landed here with a sweet prize from the recent treasure hunt competition. What came is the 4GB 2.6" TFT Touch MP4 Player from Tinydeal.com, so finally here goes. All thanks to Binh for sending this player to me. mympx.org rocks!


I will not go very technical in details in this review, although I can at least post the specs from tinydeal:

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· 4GB built-in memory. Micro-SD/T-Flash card up to 8GB
· 2.6" WQVGA TFT-LCD touch-sensitive screen control
· Quality Stereo sound and video effects for movie watching and music listening
· Picture Viewer
· FM Radio
· Ebook Reader
· Recorder
· Camera + PC Camera + DV
· Games
· Calendar

Product Specifications:

· Multi Languages: English, Español, Deutsch, Türkçe, Français, Nederlands, 한국어, Русский, ไทย, Português, 日本语, Italiano, עברית, Polski, 繁體中文 and 简体中文
· Video Player: supports AVI, 3GP and MP4 formats
· Audio Player: supports MIDI, MP3 and WMA formats
· Image Viewer: supports JPG, BMP and GIF formats
· eBook Reader: supports ANSI, Unicode and UTF_8 formats
· Built-in Stereo FM Radio
· Built-in Camera & DV: supports maximum 1280 x 1024 Pixels photo output and video 640 x 480
· Built-in Games: Explode Pigboat, Color Block and Russian diamonds
· Built-in Speaker
· Built-in MIC
· Multi-task Capability: supports browsing e-books or photos while playing audio files
· 3.5 mm earphones jack.
· High Speed USB 2.0
· Built-in rechargeable Lithium battery
· Color: White and Silver as shown in the picture
· Size: 105 x 55 x 11 mm
· Weight: 70 g

Package Contents

· 1 x MP4 Player with Built-in 4GB Memory(Micro SD/T-Flash Card NOT included)
· 1 x English User Manual
· 1 x Stereo Earphones
· 1 x USB Cable
· 1 x Charger
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The box:

Nothing fancy here. Very small but filled with great stuff like earbuds, charger unit, carrying bag, cable and even a small software CD, useful when converting videos. The earbuds included are quite impressive. Very good overall build quality, The cable is made of good materials but still lack things like gold plated jack. Some earpads in the box would be nice but missing, the earbuds are then not so comfortable as they could be.
One manual were also included, although it does only gives you basic idea how to use the MP4, as it usual contains instructions from an completely different MP4. I think I will just leave it in the box, thinking it makes things worse than any good. Beginners should still read the safety instructions.


Design:

At first look the player reminds of an well known, hated and loved phone. All the outside is made of plastic. I think plastic is not so good resistant against wear and tear, still for the budget this player is, it is to understand they had to compromise to keep costs down. Buttons are well placed and easy to access, even what direction you're holding the player. The Menu/Home button on front is mostly used to pause and play music, videos, recordings and take pictures. Above the screen we find the in-build speaker and on the top is the mic, as well as 3.5 jack and combined On/Off and hold button.
On the left side is the + and - buttons. As on most players, these are used to turn up and down volume or skip/seek media files. In this case they can also be used to scroll up and down menus. Also just below is the Micro SD slot, available to expand memory.
The button of the player reveals the mini USB port. The right side of the player has no buttons or ports.
Finally on the back I find the camera unit with one small white high-bright LED. (Flash)



Getting started:
No test without files, so I first began transferring music and other things to the player. Trying with Win 7 x64, I'm exiting to see how much trouble I will get with it.
Installation went nice smooth. If a MicroSD is present, it will be visible as well in "My computer" or just "Computer" in my case.
The very first problems occurred here, that I sometime experienced very low transfer speeds from the internal memory. Goes really slow, it goes from about a few MB to start with, but then drops to about 500 Kbit pro seconds and even lower. Not sure why it says that. The MicroSD was fine though, about 4 MB pro second (will differ from each card.)


UI:

The main menu got icons to organize each function, no surprise. Unfortunately there is no way I can place them to way I want, they locked into place. Lucky wise we have the main player functions on top. The very button row has shortcuts to useful tools that normally only is to find inside other icons. Those are PC Camera function, calendar, set date and you can even calibrate the touch screen here.
About the screen, the touch sensitiveness is kinda average, not perfect, neither very inaccurate. The responses is somewhat poor. It mostly need several presses before the player react. It gets pretty annoying.


Music player:

The player accepts basic ID3 tags like artist name, title name, album name and genre. You can find/sort your music on those parameters, the player also allowing making playlists if you like that.
I can also add new files manually but also let the player search for them automatically if needed. I'd had some problems here getting my music to show up, especially I still haven't figure how to find my music from the memory card. Might have to do with my folder structure.
Above picture shows the music player screen, got a small EQ animation on top. It's not a real EQ, if it were, I would be surprised. Below it is the name of the current played file displayed. Weirdly enough there is no tags displaying, only filenames. You can easily pause and skip/seek songs while playing and set repeat setting to repeat one, all, random or off. Also A-B feature is available directly and EQ settings. The player got 5 present EQ's: Normal, Pop, Jazz, Rock, and Classic. A click on the speaker icon let me adjust the volume with the + and - keys.
Below is the progress bar, however it can't be used for fast seeking.
Finally it's possible to open a menu at the upper right corner to access more features. I can set another "pre-listen" feature here letting the player play only a few seconds of each song. Also you can set play speed - between 0,5 to 1.2x of normal speed. Works fine and pretty cool.