Just got a Spectrum 4GB
 

Hi all, sorry if this is in the wrong section I only just found this site.

I recently bought a Spectrum 4GB blue MP4 player from Uxcell and so far it seems good. Coming from using an IPOD Mini that I had to give back, my top issues are:
1) The charger doesn't seem to work, I have to charge via my PC. This will be fine until I have to travel or something.
2) The 2 second delay when skipping between songs, which I could live with except for needing to skip a lot due to...
3) When I put songs on Random mode, unlike Ipod/Winamp/etc it doesn't know to skip ones it has already done. In fact, it seems to LOVE repeating the same songs. I had to skip one song at least 20 times yesterday, often twice in a row, while I still haven't heard 60 of the 99 I put on. Today it behaved better but still repeated many songs, just thankfully not the same one as yesterday.

So mainly about point 3, is it something I've done wrong in the settings? Or just something to live with... it's pretty annoying so far putting all these songs on and not hearing them all :(

My charger doesnt work either, so I have to use my computer.
Also, the thing I hate the most is the speed, that's why I'm getting a PSP next month.

Oh, and I made a 2pac theme for the Spectrum, so when you can modify your firmware, you can put the theme on.

Has anyone got pics of the Spectrums interface/firmware? I'd like to see what it looks like. I'm thinking about getting one for the car to attach to my FM transmitter.

I can't really upload pics and don't have any other models to compare to, so can't say much about the firmware sorry :( Hard to describe without pictures.

Anyway, since I'm bored I think I'll go ahead and post some thoughts here, maybe like a mini-review.

* As I suspected the 99 song per folder limit in the book is wrong, I loaded a whole bunch of music in there and it still works. The random feature is still a bit annoying but with more music listed it is less noticeable.

* The movie playing works better than I'd expected, but so far I only got a couple of pre-converted movies from a spanish site just to check movie/sound quality. I didn't plan to use it for this anyway, it's just a nice bonus.

* The text reading feature is pretty much completely useless. The player seems to have a default 8 seconds of no activity -> black screen setting. This is turned off for movies, but for some reason not text! So if you are reading and it takes you more than 8 seconds to read the screen, it will go black and you need to hit a button. Very annoying. Also, words do not wrap, they cut off in the middle. I don't mind this so much, but some people might. Of course, this slows you down, leading to - a black screen! Woohoo.

* Radio works fine for me, though seeking stations is a hassle - why can't it let us just input the numbers instead of slooooooowly going up/down the list? Once you add your favourites to memory though it's all good.

* The charger they gave me doesn't seem to work, so I just USB charge it. If I'm ever stuck in a hotel wanting music, this might annoy me so I'll probably look for a solution.

* The book lied about games. They promised more but all they gave me is a Tetris clone boo. Not an issue though as I wouldn't use them anyway, but thought I'd mention it.

* Didn't try voice record/playback yet, might be good for spying on people but probably not from my pocket.

Nice mini review ^^

Re: Just got a Spectrum 4GB
 

I'm looking at getting one of these - can you tell me how fast the USB transfer speed is? Does transferring 4GB of MP3s take a few minutes, or more like an hour?

The transfer speed should be standard USB speeds as far as I can tell. My PC only has USB1.0 drivers installed so it's slow, but not unbearable. If you have USB2.0 I see no reason why it wouldn't be really fast.

Also, out of the box it didn't work, and refused to format with the supplied software. So I did the technique listed somewhere else to format for you 'real' player disk size (set whole disk to encrypted, format, then redo with your proper partition size - or something. it didn't let me format until I played with the partition size.) and then it worked fine.

Anyway I used this one a bit more, I'm happy with it but the interface is not great and some of my favourite music doesn't want to appear during random play. Ah well.