Customer Reviews

Centon 1GB USB 2.0 Digital MP3 WMA Player Voice Recorder Flash Drive

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This thing is awesomely loaded ... fm radio, voice recorder, mp3 playback, lyric display with .lrc files, multilanguage menus (including Trad and Simp Chinese, which is not on some of the other models? or was added to this model later?), multispeed playback (e.g. stretch an 1 min mp3 to 2 minutes or speed through in 30 secs) **BUT** operating it is not very intuitive and the documentation that comes with it is terrible. Centon has an on-line forum to ask questions, but I was not able to register in 3 attempts. Battery life is okay, at least 5 hrs on a rechargable AAA, I usually recharge before the indicator gets half empty. There is an annoying pause with a 'Please wait' message when you first start it up. Not sure how/if you can get the unit to play items in sorted by filename. There is a menu item for a Playlist, which uses A3L format files. I have no idea what that is but it is not plain text like .m3u.

If they would have thrown me a bone with the documentation (fix the forum or include a decent manual) or if it had an SD slot (it doesn't) I would have given it a 5 despite the boondongle operating procedures.

Oh yeah, the thing has a USB connector built-in (like a thumb drive), the cover comes off complete and is easily misplaced. You need to remove the USB cover and another cover to replace the battery, but meh no big deal.

Very good product for the price. The sound is not the best, but compense the price... Very Easy to use!!!

If you're looking for a low cost MP3 player/ digital recorder you found it. I wouldn't recommend this product for its advanced features because they are difficult to use.
My Favorite feature: The Headset is built-in to the lanyard. This means the ear buds aren't yanked out of your ears.
Coolest Feature: You can record songs off the FM tuner and play them back later. ROCK ON!
Worse Feature: Play/Pause button, if pressed for a millisecond too long, will pop you out of whatever you are doing and start recording.

This is extremely hard to use and confusing. Mine came without instructions. I accidentally pressed the "hold" button and have never since managed to get it off hold.

I purchased three of these as Christmas presents. My eight-year old loved it...until she realized the lanyard clip didn't work (we then used a twist tie to hold the lanyard on), the key ring thing broke, and then the player stopped playing altogether! She did not abuse this in the least. We returned it for a refund. The other two are still working fine but don't get nearly as much use. I also recommend buying a rechargeable player, as this one eats batteries. We replaced my daughter's player with a ZenV by Creative, which I highly recommend.

I really like this product. I have this small player hooked up to my car amp which is 1500 Watts RMS. It really gives clean cound with the mp3 music downloaded. Thge radio gives slight static where the signal is weak, but the radio plays OK with the supplied headphones. Nice colors on the screan and nice features like equalizer, repeat, speed of sound play too!!! My friends like it. I will really like to get one with maybe 4 gigs memory.

It claims to hold 1 GB, and thsi is so, but it can only actually fit 512k of mp3s in the file that plays back mp3s. It was a firmware limitation. Other than that it's cheap, and has nifty features. But the short battery life is a bummer.

The mp3 player is great, it has a great fm radio with wonderful linear display of an fm dial, the mp3 music plays great, good headphones, and easy to use interface, generally speaking. It takes a moment to figure out that you push down on the joysticky nob, but once you figure that out, it's very intuitive. The overall feel is nice, and it looks good. The one thing that annoys me is that on one of my computers, the driver software is wacky. When I plug in the usb drive, instead of another drive ("drive f:") I get "TECHSPLOSION" and then two subdirectories, one for data and one for playlists. So I can drop in files into the data dir. The problem is that I can't find out how much free space is available as the right click popup doesn't show this! Also, I can't delete files sometimes! So I just reformat the drive and start from scratch. I'm glad my other computer has better drivers, so I can see how much space there is and put new files on it without having to reformat the drive each time. Both computers are WinXP, the bad one is Compaq, and the good one is my home clone PC from Microcenter. I've tried so many ways to update the drivers on the Compaq, including going to the mp3 player's website, the compaq web site, the MS web site, etc. I'm stuck there. But luckily, I have my non-Compaq. Phew. Still worth the $40!

I bought three of these items and with in two weeks all three began to malfunction ,the fm radio function stopped working and the player kept switching on and off rendering it useless.The only funtion remained partially working is the flash drive memory option.

Without a doubt this device is capable of emitting sound. For the price it is a decent buy, but the quality of the player itself is extremely poor. The menu button is very loose and is at times difficult to time the cahnge of a song or playlist. The playlist and menu itself takes time to familiarize yourself with. I would not recommend this product.