- Pocket size, lightweight and compact
- 3.5 inch LCD screen
- Built in rechargeable Li-On battery for up to 6 hours play time of video and music, up to 3 hours for TV
- Built in telescopic antenna
- Built in speaker
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Product Description
Enjoy your favorite television programs anywhere digital channels are available. Watch video, play MP3 and display your photos on your micro SD card/USB device for up to 6 hours. Truly pocket size, great for all occasions.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Vine™ Review
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This product has potential, but the quality seems pretty lacking. I received this as part of the Vine program, so some of the issues might be due to me getting a pre-production item - but perhaps not.
Build Quality/Design:
The materials used aren't too bad in general (e.g. the case feels solid), but I'm not very impressed by the quality control on this unit. Mine has finger prints _underneath_ the glass cover on the screen (which is not removable) that are pretty disappointing. So, they didn't check if the main viewing area was clean before installing it - that's poor control. Also, the port on the player for connecting the supplied external antenna is poorly designed. I installed the antenna, but then could not get it detached. I might not be a mechanic, but I know how to connect/disconnect antennas. The company's customer service verified that I was doing the right thing to disconnect it. The external antenna has a long cord on it, which is nice for reception but annoying when it won't detach from a portable player. After hours, I eventually just pulled it out with pliers, broke it in the process, and wrote off ever connecting it again.
Menus/Screen:
Using this is pretty intuitive, so kids could certainly use it. The start up screen takes longer to load than I would expect or like, but it's easy to navigate the menus. The screen is nice - I'll give it that. It's got a nice picture to it. It's bright and has good color.
TV Viewing:
Reception is decent given the limitations of the supplied antennas, but be sure to consider those limitations. These antennas are small. If you're planning to use it as a TV, consider what kind of reception you'll get where you want to use it. I knew going in that reception at my house is limited, and this TV does pull in the same two stations that I get with a _small_ antenna on my other TVs. A larger antenna gets me several more, but there's no obvious way of connecting a different antenna to this product (and would defeat the purpose, as it's supposed to be portable). Because of the poor design on the antenna jack that I mentioned above, I'm stuck using the extendable antenna that doesn't pull much in at all where I live.
Media Viewing:
I can't speak to this, as I don't have a microSD card to plug into it. Perhaps those are common these days, so I won't judge their choice for that. The reported list of supported formats is extensive, though. It would be nice if it had some internal memory to store something.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this product for the price.
Build Quality/Design:
The materials used aren't too bad in general (e.g. the case feels solid), but I'm not very impressed by the quality control on this unit. Mine has finger prints _underneath_ the glass cover on the screen (which is not removable) that are pretty disappointing. So, they didn't check if the main viewing area was clean before installing it - that's poor control. Also, the port on the player for connecting the supplied external antenna is poorly designed. I installed the antenna, but then could not get it detached. I might not be a mechanic, but I know how to connect/disconnect antennas. The company's customer service verified that I was doing the right thing to disconnect it. The external antenna has a long cord on it, which is nice for reception but annoying when it won't detach from a portable player. After hours, I eventually just pulled it out with pliers, broke it in the process, and wrote off ever connecting it again.
Menus/Screen:
Using this is pretty intuitive, so kids could certainly use it. The start up screen takes longer to load than I would expect or like, but it's easy to navigate the menus. The screen is nice - I'll give it that. It's got a nice picture to it. It's bright and has good color.
TV Viewing:
Reception is decent given the limitations of the supplied antennas, but be sure to consider those limitations. These antennas are small. If you're planning to use it as a TV, consider what kind of reception you'll get where you want to use it. I knew going in that reception at my house is limited, and this TV does pull in the same two stations that I get with a _small_ antenna on my other TVs. A larger antenna gets me several more, but there's no obvious way of connecting a different antenna to this product (and would defeat the purpose, as it's supposed to be portable). Because of the poor design on the antenna jack that I mentioned above, I'm stuck using the extendable antenna that doesn't pull much in at all where I live.
Media Viewing:
I can't speak to this, as I don't have a microSD card to plug into it. Perhaps those are common these days, so I won't judge their choice for that. The reported list of supported formats is extensive, though. It would be nice if it had some internal memory to store something.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this product for the price.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV is also a multimedia device supporting multiple image, video and audio formats. Audio through the unit's single speaker is a bit tinny and slightly underpowered. At full or nearly full volume it's not all that loud. The unit does have a headphone jack and the addition of a set of decent buds or headphones will improve audio quality quite a bit although there are no bass or treble controls. It comes with a clear plastic screen protector and be warned, if you remove it getting it to lay perfectly flat again is nearly impossible.
Along with the headphone connector the TV also has a single Micro-SD memory card slot. I purchased a 2-GIG card to test this device with. I do not know, and the manual does not say, if the TV supports the newer, larger SDHC style cards. The device has NO user accessible internal memory.
All input and control are accomplished via two buttons on the face and a four way directional button set. The buttons are stiff and I found, with my thick fingers, that manipulating the directional arrow buttons was a bit hard to do with accuracy.
My unit, which is white as opposed to the stated black, arrived with a USB cable (which I have not used) an AC adapter/charger, an external antenna and a peg/tab stand on a lanyard. I found attaching the lanyard to the unit (you'll likely lose the stand otherwise) to be a complete pain and required a bent pin to accomplish.
Television Reception:
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV has a built in rod antenna which feels very fragile and easy to bend. The antenna also has a swivel base so care must be exercised when pushing it back into the unit. The included external antenna has a nicely long cord so it can be positioned easily for optimal reception. For the sake of reference I live approximately 80 miles South East of Orlando Florida on the coast. Using the built-in antenna, indoors, upon initial setup the channel scan was unable to find any stations. Plugging the external antenna in resulted in around a dozen channels being found during the setup scan. The 320x240 LCD screen images are crisp and sharp. Colors are vibrant and clear and I was pleasantly surprised at the adjustability of the picture including brightness, contrast, tint and color mode. Moving the television while watching TV should be avoided as the picture will often freeze and breakup. I was quite happy to find that one of the stations I do get is a 24/7 local area weather channel. During Florida's frequent power outages due to severe weather and hurricanes this will be invaluable.
Video Playback:
I loaded over a GIG of video files onto my Micro-SD card to test the Tivax's ability to playback video files. I chose a mixed batch of AVI, MPG, WMV and MOV file formats. WMV files are not supported at all (oddly the unit DOES support WMA audio files, go figure) and the support for the other formats was hit or miss. Approximately 60% of the fifty or so video clips I've tried to play were supported, but the rest just returned an error. Those that did play did so quite well. Picture quality was good (dependant, of course, on the quality of the videos) as was the audio playback. Perhaps they'll release a firmware update for the unit to add further CODEC support.
Audio Playback:
As I previously mentioned, the system's speaker is quite tinny. Don't expect great quality sound from it. It's not horrible but it could be better. I tested several dozen MP3 files on my Tivax including low (80 kbps) and very high (320 kbps) bit rate files as well as variable-bit rate encoded files and it played all of them without a problem.
Image Playback/Slide show:
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV supports JPEG, PNG, GIF and BMP image formats. Images display crisp and clean with bright and true colors. Landscape oriented images display best and while you can rotate images that are portrait oriented there is a distinct quality loss during rotation. Images can be zoomed in on with multiple levels of zoom.
The slide show feature is nicely configurable. The delay between images can be set or turned off for manual page turning. The transition effect done while changing images also has many options. The Tivax will also play any MP3 files in the same location as the images as background music during the slide show. I actually couldn't find a way NOT to have this happen if the audio and video files were mixed together on the memory card although the volume can be set to zero this will surely use more battery power even with the volume down.
One feature which I liked, but was not mentioned in the manual, is the ability to set one of your own images as the startup `logo'.
Power:
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV comes with a built in Lithium Ion battery which they state can be recharged approximately 500 times.
I found that their claimed charge durations were quite accurate. Watching Digital TV with the volume set to around 75% I was twice able to watch for a bit more than three hours before the unit turned off. I loaded several hundred large image files onto the memory card and set the unit to running them as a slide show (silent) and was able to achieve just over six hours of playback before the battery died. MP3 playback resulted in similar results of around five and a half hours of continuous play.
When charging there are NO indicator lights showing that the unit is charging nor any way, short of turning it on, to tell if it has fully charged. There is also no on screen low battery warning. When my battery was depleted the unit simply shut itself off.
Finally:
This is a nice unit and far more than just a digital TV set. A padded case would be a nice option. I'm going to try some of the smartphone cases to see if any fit. I really don't want to scratch or damage the screen. The external antenna while mildly magnetic really needs to be weighted and/or have a clip attached to it as it is rather light and hard to keep in place.
Along with the headphone connector the TV also has a single Micro-SD memory card slot. I purchased a 2-GIG card to test this device with. I do not know, and the manual does not say, if the TV supports the newer, larger SDHC style cards. The device has NO user accessible internal memory.
All input and control are accomplished via two buttons on the face and a four way directional button set. The buttons are stiff and I found, with my thick fingers, that manipulating the directional arrow buttons was a bit hard to do with accuracy.
My unit, which is white as opposed to the stated black, arrived with a USB cable (which I have not used) an AC adapter/charger, an external antenna and a peg/tab stand on a lanyard. I found attaching the lanyard to the unit (you'll likely lose the stand otherwise) to be a complete pain and required a bent pin to accomplish.
Television Reception:
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV has a built in rod antenna which feels very fragile and easy to bend. The antenna also has a swivel base so care must be exercised when pushing it back into the unit. The included external antenna has a nicely long cord so it can be positioned easily for optimal reception. For the sake of reference I live approximately 80 miles South East of Orlando Florida on the coast. Using the built-in antenna, indoors, upon initial setup the channel scan was unable to find any stations. Plugging the external antenna in resulted in around a dozen channels being found during the setup scan. The 320x240 LCD screen images are crisp and sharp. Colors are vibrant and clear and I was pleasantly surprised at the adjustability of the picture including brightness, contrast, tint and color mode. Moving the television while watching TV should be avoided as the picture will often freeze and breakup. I was quite happy to find that one of the stations I do get is a 24/7 local area weather channel. During Florida's frequent power outages due to severe weather and hurricanes this will be invaluable.
Video Playback:
I loaded over a GIG of video files onto my Micro-SD card to test the Tivax's ability to playback video files. I chose a mixed batch of AVI, MPG, WMV and MOV file formats. WMV files are not supported at all (oddly the unit DOES support WMA audio files, go figure) and the support for the other formats was hit or miss. Approximately 60% of the fifty or so video clips I've tried to play were supported, but the rest just returned an error. Those that did play did so quite well. Picture quality was good (dependant, of course, on the quality of the videos) as was the audio playback. Perhaps they'll release a firmware update for the unit to add further CODEC support.
Audio Playback:
As I previously mentioned, the system's speaker is quite tinny. Don't expect great quality sound from it. It's not horrible but it could be better. I tested several dozen MP3 files on my Tivax including low (80 kbps) and very high (320 kbps) bit rate files as well as variable-bit rate encoded files and it played all of them without a problem.
Image Playback/Slide show:
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV supports JPEG, PNG, GIF and BMP image formats. Images display crisp and clean with bright and true colors. Landscape oriented images display best and while you can rotate images that are portrait oriented there is a distinct quality loss during rotation. Images can be zoomed in on with multiple levels of zoom.
The slide show feature is nicely configurable. The delay between images can be set or turned off for manual page turning. The transition effect done while changing images also has many options. The Tivax will also play any MP3 files in the same location as the images as background music during the slide show. I actually couldn't find a way NOT to have this happen if the audio and video files were mixed together on the memory card although the volume can be set to zero this will surely use more battery power even with the volume down.
One feature which I liked, but was not mentioned in the manual, is the ability to set one of your own images as the startup `logo'.
Power:
The Tivax 3.5-Inch Digital TV comes with a built in Lithium Ion battery which they state can be recharged approximately 500 times.
I found that their claimed charge durations were quite accurate. Watching Digital TV with the volume set to around 75% I was twice able to watch for a bit more than three hours before the unit turned off. I loaded several hundred large image files onto the memory card and set the unit to running them as a slide show (silent) and was able to achieve just over six hours of playback before the battery died. MP3 playback resulted in similar results of around five and a half hours of continuous play.
When charging there are NO indicator lights showing that the unit is charging nor any way, short of turning it on, to tell if it has fully charged. There is also no on screen low battery warning. When my battery was depleted the unit simply shut itself off.
Finally:
This is a nice unit and far more than just a digital TV set. A padded case would be a nice option. I'm going to try some of the smartphone cases to see if any fit. I really don't want to scratch or damage the screen. The external antenna while mildly magnetic really needs to be weighted and/or have a clip attached to it as it is rather light and hard to keep in place.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
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Length:
7:44
Mins
Tivax 3.5" Digital TV / B003N18O88
Note: Before you watch the video (which shows you how to setup and use the Tivax, should you purchase one), you will probably want to read further - I couldn't fit all this information into the 10 minute video time frame. (I also apologize for the lack of focus in the video - I'm afraid my camera had trouble with the Tivax screen.)
I received this little handheld TV through Amazon Vine and tried to put it through the paces. This is the first handheld TV I've had much of a chance to sample, but after my time with Tivax, I have to feel that there must be something better out there.
First, the basics. This television captures free-to-air digital TV signals, so there's no subscription and you can supposedly watch TV anywhere, anytime. This unit just includes basic "watching" functionality, so if you're spoiled by TiVo-style record, rewind, and fast-forward options, you may find it jarring to go back to old-school TV watching.
Pros first: The lack of options (and buttons!) makes the TV relatively simple to set up. I've included a video showcasing basic setup, but the device is easy to use and some impressively thick paperwork came with it, in case you get stuck. In fact, the menus were so easy to navigate, that I managed to set up closed captions almost immediately, even before I started to look for them - that's user friendliness I wish most large sized TVs came with. And once the channels are set up, the actual visual screen is quite lovely - crisp, clear, and clean, as long as the reception is good and the unit is held stationary.
Which brings me all too quickly to the cons. This is such a cute unit with such a pretty screen that I almost hate to beat on it, but there's a lot that goes wrong with this great idea. Firstly, and I understand this might be true for all digital TVs, you either have a stellar image or pretty much no image at all - there's none of the old "you can see the screen but it's covered over in a thin layer of static" stuff from the analog days. And while Tivax can hardly be blamed, I couldn't help but notice that there's very little to actually *watch* on free-to-air digital TV - of the 25 stations that were sensed in my area, several had terrible reception (i.e., a constant black screen), and once I weeded out the televangelist channels and the shopping channels and the weather channels, I was left with about a dozen channels total: half in English and half in Spanish.
When you find something to watch, you'll then be faced with the problem that the audio is pretty poor - staticky and crackly. I first thought this was the fault of the reception, or the TV channels themselves, but when I was testing the Micro SD functionality and loaded one of my MP3s on the device, the song scratched and warbled in strong contrast to my MP3 player - an issue which put to rest any thoughts I had on using this to carry music around with me. (Also, the music player goes into a weird, colorful "screensaver" mode, which is odd because I'd rather the screen stay blank to save battery power.)
I couldn't, incidentally, test the claims that video can be loaded and watched via the Micro SD functionality, because the device doesn't seem to recognize or support MP4 videos. To me, that's a *HUGE* flaw - I don't even own an iPod, and yet the popular "iPod video format" of MP4 is practically the entirety of my video library! My two-year-old Sony Walkman can play MP4s, so I'm not sure what Tivax's excuse for this issue could be - hopefully they can fix the issue via a software update in the future?
I'm choosing to believe that this isn't a terrible product IF you're the target audience for this device. The target audience, in my opinion, would be someone who is used to and regularly watches free-to-air TV already (and won't be jarred by the lack of channels and lack of viewing/recording options), and who is just looking for a small device to take with them to events where battery power is necessary - a tailgate party, or camping. Someone who doesn't care about the non-functioning bells and whistles (video and MP3 functionality), and someone who won't care too much that the audio quality is rather poor and the video requires you to stay fairly stationary at all times. The problem is, in a world of satellite TV, TiVo, smart phones, and computer tablets, I don't know anyone personally who fits into that audience.
~ Ana Mardoll
Note: Before you watch the video (which shows you how to setup and use the Tivax, should you purchase one), you will probably want to read further - I couldn't fit all this information into the 10 minute video time frame. (I also apologize for the lack of focus in the video - I'm afraid my camera had trouble with the Tivax screen.)
I received this little handheld TV through Amazon Vine and tried to put it through the paces. This is the first handheld TV I've had much of a chance to sample, but after my time with Tivax, I have to feel that there must be something better out there.
First, the basics. This television captures free-to-air digital TV signals, so there's no subscription and you can supposedly watch TV anywhere, anytime. This unit just includes basic "watching" functionality, so if you're spoiled by TiVo-style record, rewind, and fast-forward options, you may find it jarring to go back to old-school TV watching.
Pros first: The lack of options (and buttons!) makes the TV relatively simple to set up. I've included a video showcasing basic setup, but the device is easy to use and some impressively thick paperwork came with it, in case you get stuck. In fact, the menus were so easy to navigate, that I managed to set up closed captions almost immediately, even before I started to look for them - that's user friendliness I wish most large sized TVs came with. And once the channels are set up, the actual visual screen is quite lovely - crisp, clear, and clean, as long as the reception is good and the unit is held stationary.
Which brings me all too quickly to the cons. This is such a cute unit with such a pretty screen that I almost hate to beat on it, but there's a lot that goes wrong with this great idea. Firstly, and I understand this might be true for all digital TVs, you either have a stellar image or pretty much no image at all - there's none of the old "you can see the screen but it's covered over in a thin layer of static" stuff from the analog days. And while Tivax can hardly be blamed, I couldn't help but notice that there's very little to actually *watch* on free-to-air digital TV - of the 25 stations that were sensed in my area, several had terrible reception (i.e., a constant black screen), and once I weeded out the televangelist channels and the shopping channels and the weather channels, I was left with about a dozen channels total: half in English and half in Spanish.
When you find something to watch, you'll then be faced with the problem that the audio is pretty poor - staticky and crackly. I first thought this was the fault of the reception, or the TV channels themselves, but when I was testing the Micro SD functionality and loaded one of my MP3s on the device, the song scratched and warbled in strong contrast to my MP3 player - an issue which put to rest any thoughts I had on using this to carry music around with me. (Also, the music player goes into a weird, colorful "screensaver" mode, which is odd because I'd rather the screen stay blank to save battery power.)
I couldn't, incidentally, test the claims that video can be loaded and watched via the Micro SD functionality, because the device doesn't seem to recognize or support MP4 videos. To me, that's a *HUGE* flaw - I don't even own an iPod, and yet the popular "iPod video format" of MP4 is practically the entirety of my video library! My two-year-old Sony Walkman can play MP4s, so I'm not sure what Tivax's excuse for this issue could be - hopefully they can fix the issue via a software update in the future?
I'm choosing to believe that this isn't a terrible product IF you're the target audience for this device. The target audience, in my opinion, would be someone who is used to and regularly watches free-to-air TV already (and won't be jarred by the lack of channels and lack of viewing/recording options), and who is just looking for a small device to take with them to events where battery power is necessary - a tailgate party, or camping. Someone who doesn't care about the non-functioning bells and whistles (video and MP3 functionality), and someone who won't care too much that the audio quality is rather poor and the video requires you to stay fairly stationary at all times. The problem is, in a world of satellite TV, TiVo, smart phones, and computer tablets, I don't know anyone personally who fits into that audience.
~ Ana Mardoll
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