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Creative Labs Rhomba 128 MB MP3 Player

Creative Labs Rhomba 128 MB MP3 Player

List Price: $149.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Great at First, but......
Review: My daughter received this item as a Christmas gift. About a month ago it just stopped working. We have had several emails and phone calls back and forth to the company, "Creative" is an accurate name for them...they are creative about honoring the 90 day warranty by putting you off until you are out of warranty. They have promised three times to email me the forms to have it fixed or replaced...and nothing yet. I emailed the company again today. They do not have a customer service number that is toll free, and I am about done running up my phone bill.

We were happy with it for the first 60 days or so, but now, I will never buy another "Creative" product again, based on their customer service.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Great at First, but......
Review: My daughter received this item as a Christmas gift. About a month ago it just stopped working. We have had several emails and phone calls back and forth to the company, "Creative" is an accurate name for them...they are creative about honoring the 90 day warranty by putting you off until you are out of warranty. They have promised three times to email me the forms to have it fixed or replaced...and nothing yet. I emailed the company again today. They do not have a customer service number that is toll free, and I am about done running up my phone bill.

We were happy with it for the first 60 days or so, but now, I will never buy another "Creative" product again, based on their customer service.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excelente. Great Sound Quality
Review: My Rhomba. Its a excellent MP3 Player, FM Radio, Voice Recorder, and "portable drive".

The "pro's":
Great Sound.
Strong Bass.
Good FM signal receiver.
Pretty.
Light.
Blue ligth.

The "con's":
Firmware Update needed. The files are in the creative web.

Es la mejor alternativa. He conocido muchos pendrive con FM que se venden en Chile, pero el sonido no se compara con el del "Rhomba".

La mejor decision.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Compare/Contrast MP3s: Flash Memory/Hard drives
Review: Okay. Here is a write up, that I did, on the comparisons/contrasts on MP3 players. Mainly, the Harddrive versions (I.E. Rio Riot/Apple IPOD -both of which I own) and the flash memory type... (I.E. Memorex 3642 Mp3 Player, of which I own as well).
What prompted this little jaunt (of which you may send to as many people as you like) My (expensive) Apple IPOD died during a sync last month. Just me copying files over to it, and the battery ran out of juice. I would have not attempted to copy music had I known the battery was low, but the battery read FULL STRENGTH. Anyhoo, I called Apple, they said return it for maintenance.
I did. Sent it back.
They returned it, still broke.

To my suprise, there is only a TEN DAY return policy.

TEN DAYS.

I did not realize this at all... and will not ever buy another apple product.

So, after a month or so of messing around trying to find another MP3 player... I decided to go with a flash memory MP3 player, the ones that use memory sticks.

SO, here are the pro and cons of these devices.

Pro's for the Memory Stick Mp3 players

-Cheaper. WAY CHEAPER than Hard drive types.

-If you go into music match and file convert to MP3 Pro and shrink the size of your MP3 to like, say 3o percent... you can really make a good Kompression. Example. My Memorex MP3 player has 32mbs of memory on board. It is expandable to 256mb. 32 mb will basically let you put one cd's worth of music. It is easy to put music on and off of them, due to your computer reading the USB as just another hard drive, so you drag and drop to put on, delete them to take them off. But, after you shrink your files to MP3 Pro 30 percent, you can put twice as many. So, basically a 256mb chip will allow me to put 208 songs on my little less than palm size MP3 player. And it wieghs like 3 ounces.

- More on memory. These little chips are the size of the upper part of your thumb, at least my thumb anyway. They come in 128mb, 256mb, 512mb and even though there aren't any MP3 machines out there to handle them YET, you can even buy a 1.5gig thumb size chip thingy. Considering the size of the chips and the shrinking kompression I told you about earlier, I could shrink my whole KOLLEKTION down to 10 of those 1.5gig chips. At the current shrink rate I am at 5 DVD's, which are way bigger and more fragile than these little chips.

- Not as fragile as hard drive type. You can drop one of these chips and not scratch it. I wouldn't stomp on one with my foot, nor get one in water, but they are encased in plastic. Ruggedish.

- Batteries last for like two days. There isn't much going on here, no moving parts, no laser or hard drive to put power to. Most of these flash Memory types have a single AA battery. I use a rechargeable type, so we are talking very low cost here.
In comparison to the hard drive types, where you will get a solid 8 hours of playing, this really whupps up.

- Size. Small. Very small. Mine is three inches by three inches. A square. But, you can get smaller ones. And the memory chips that go in them are the same ones you use for your camera. And you can put files on them. If you want to put a word doc on your memory chip, you can. Your Mp3 won't recognize it, but it is nifty storage.

COMPARISON/CONTRAST

- Size does matter. In the case of hard drive Mp3 players... lets face it, you can, if you so chose to, put a library of congress on these monsters. They are the caddilacs of the hand held devices, and guzzle batteries like gasoline. But when it comes down to it, size is the only thing they have going for them. I don't mean to downplay the hard drive types, but don't drop them, don't shake them, and after shelling out $499 to Apple you might consider insurance. Apple doesn't care about you or your apple after 10 days of ownership.

- Price/Komparison. IPOD ran me $499 bucks. My memorex MP3 player ran me 45 dollars. The 128 memory chip runs you 50 bucks. Owch. There really isn't a comparison to the two. The memory stick Mp3 players just kick ? on this issue. And, you get MORE than a ten day return policy, since you buy these things at Target/Wal Mart etc...

So, that is my review in a nutshell

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Don't buy this Product !!!!,
Review: read the reviews on the Internet the same way you are reading now. When I went to the store I have been misled by the salesman. He told me that the creative is a great brand and no one returned the product so far. He told me " if it was a bad product creative would have taken it of the shelf by now". I bought the product and it stop working after TWO DAYS" not responding at all. I talked to the customer support and they ask me to send the product to them. It takes along..... time to get it back believe me I havent got the mine yet. Dealing with their customer support is hell. remember I warned you "Dont buy this product"

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It's a solid product
Review: Solid product, dude who said there was no manuals is a retard.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Where's the manual
Review: Sounds like a great product, but when the manufacturer's website gives a response like this:

Manuals
Sorry, no manuals are available for the selected query.

...it is sad, since it looks like a nice product, but no available manual support ?? Do I have to purchase it, and then go through the manual to decide its not what I want ? And I lose on the return shipping everytime !

Before purchasing, reviewing the manual makes a BIG difference to the buyer to know how this device is manipulated. I had reviewed many similar products to come to the conclusion that when multi-function devices like these are made, the critical functions are given a back-seat...for example, voice recording..for those who buy this product for memo recording, if we have to press a number of buttons to get to what we want, it defeats the purpose of having this feature at all.

Amazon's awesome feature of looking at the product manual really helps us decide on a purchase. I do hope more people support Amazon for these litle extras they provide.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: poor implementation of a good idea
Review: The combination of FM radio, Voice Recorder and less importantly WMA/MP3 player in a small form factor appealed to me and, knowing the risks of such a behaviour, I became an early adopter.

Good things first: the device looks nice, isn't too big - barely bigger than the original Muvo - and, the stock earphones sound are relatively decent. But... but... even after setting the FM mode to Europe (why in the world is Creative shipping such a device with inappropriate default local parameters when they do attempt to maintain three different regional web sites for their slightly different product lines?) FM reception remains of very high quality. The signal to noise ratio is reminiscent of an early 80s turntable, tuning isn't very stable, "best" reception seems to be achieved about 0.05 Mhz above the official frequency, the dynamic range seems a bit compressed, the auto-scan misses 90% of the stations a cheap tuner gets, etc... All of this conspire to create an overall disappointing FM listening experience. Radio recording is therefore intrinsically limited.

The battery life is closer to 8 hours than 14. Voice recording is acceptable, no more. MP3 playback is good (but who has bad MP3 sound nowadays?). Creative Media Source is a big improvement over the useless stuff Creative used to ship with its device.

If Creative doesn't address some of the FM issues by a firmware update - if that is possible - the Rhomba will disappoint me.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A product with error.
Review: The first day I bought this, it didn't work. But then the next day, it worked a gain. I continued to use it for 1 month, and it didn't work completely. Many people used it and said that it is a bad product with errors.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A great MP3 player but don't use the software
Review: The Rhomba MP3 player by Creative Labs is great. The player is easy to use, and it does not require batteries. One does not have to use the software that comes with the player (unless you are using Windows 98, in which case you need the drivers). The software is not really worth using. It is basically like Media Player, only worse. And really Media Player does almost everything now so why bother. The converter program isn't very good if you are converting a large number of songs (it will freeze), but it is all right for converting one or two. If you want a converter for MP3s use dBPowerAMP. I did find that when I uninstalled the software my computer would reboot for no reason when I plugged in my MP3 player to charge. I am not sure why that would occur, but it doesn't happen with the software installed, so if you need it keep it. You don't have to make the Creative player your default anyway (so don't let it trick you).

The MP3 player itself is easy to use and remains charged for a decent amount of time. I use it for walking to and from class at college, and it more than suits my needs.


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