Olympus m:robe MR-500i Music Player with Digital Camera

Rating:
Summary: Need some firmware / software updates to be great
Review: The hardware design is great. Multilingual display, backlit remote also display track info. Camera is at acceptable quality. Noisy as usual in dark environment. Cannot be a digital camera replacement but can be good if you just need a quick snapshot of something.

The mp3 decoding has a little too much noise. Very noticeable when playing certain kind of "quiet" music such as classical or any form of unplugged instrumental, even the mp3 files are encoded at 320kbps constant bit rate stereo. The interface response time is a little sluggish, like one or two second delay after each button click. Honestly I'm not very happy with this product due to these two issues since I spent $420 for this and I'm expecting excellent quality. I hope they can be resolved through a firmware update.

Remix function is fairly neat, but I don't really use it. Quite some work to set up one remix, and you have to do it per track. I wish there is a remix setup per album / playlist function option.

The m:trip software is fair. Need some work as well, such as the playlist order easily get messed up by browsing in other search method list. And some music files fail to accept an album cover image even it's showing in m:trip. Biggest complain is when you have a bunch of mp3s under one album, and if they don't have track no. tagged in their info, m:trip will upload them to the player regardless of the track file names, that is you can have the files in order in winamp (since winamp load files in numeric / alphabetical order), but not in m:robe. I have to go in and type in the track no. to make m:trip place them in order, and I have to do it one by one, no auto numbering functions.

Honestly, I would say, wait for firmware / software update for this pricey unpolished product... It would totally deserve a 5 stars rating if they can fix these issues.

Rating:
Summary: Great Player!
Review: The m:robe 500 is a great looking player with very cool functionality. Everyone that sees me with my m:robe wants to get one. Highly recommended!