Just uploaded a pic of my new player, got at Fry's for $49. A Kaser Mambo Flix Yofun106v1-4GB. This one looks slightly different than the picture on Kaser's site. Appears to have two speakers on back, and unfortunately also has the dreaded speaker always on problem where the headphone jack does not shut off the speaker. Turns out though, upon opening the unit, there is actually only ONE speaker, the other just has a piece of double-stick foam, though does appear to be sorta near the microphone which otherwise doesn't have an external opening. From looking at the back with the "speaker" holes at the top, the rightmost one has an actual speaker behind it.
And the battery life on this one is short-- seems to run less than 2 hours mp3 play even though Kaser claims 6. I would think that they must have had ones that didn't have the speaker problem when testing for battery life, or I've got a bad battery.
I'm going to disconnect the speaker, as it sounds like crap pretty much anyway and will hopefully improve the battery life. Also, it's an RK260X chip as reported by Chip Genius, but actual chip is marked RK2606A, so without firmware it's not possible to re-skin it, and Kaser so far does not have firmware up for it. Settings/System info shows version 00.00.0001 dated 6/13/08, so it's fairly new it would appear.
Now that I've found this site I'll confer here before buying another such unit and find one that has more hackable firmware... Would be an OK unit though if the battery would last a little longer-- sometimes these cells work a little better after being charged & discharged a few times, I'm hoping the short life is just because it's new.
Also, the USB cable didn't work-- or at least not to connect via USB to the computer, I had to find another one. The cable was rather thin, and it seems possible it's only designed for power to go with the charger, but that seems a little odd as then there's no way out of the box to use it with a computer until you dig up another USB cable somewhere.
And the fact that it has no facility for a playlist is rather annoying-- you can have it loop on a directory or on the whole device, and that's as close to having separate playlists as you can get. It can't be that hard to program it for a real playlist and it's not like there's not enough memory space to store such a program.
If I can't get the battery life up I may just hook it up to a wallwart via the USB connector or something and have it a home play only unit, or cobble together a cigarette-lighter power adapter for my car, which is what I bought it for. I also have a Kaser Mambo BW 2G that is much better for bat life because it uses a single AAA battery that will last many days of extended playing if I get an Energizer Lithium. I wish these new flat-pack players would use AAA's as at least it gives me some options.
--
Synch
Mambo Flix Yofun 106v1-4GB
