Stu-Art

Last week I splashed out on something that I didn't really need, but it was such a bargain I just had to have it. It is the $99 Pure 8GB MP4 Player from ALDI.

Click to enlarge

The first thing I noticed when I opened the box (it comes in very nice packaging by the way!) was how small it is, yet how big the screen is! Then I had to try and find the buttons, as there is nothing but the screen on the face of the device, which could easily fool you into thinking the device is touch-screen. Thankfully it's not. I prefer the tactile response of buttons over touchscreens, which tend to be annoyingly inaccurate. The navigation buttons were on the top of the device, and then I found the power-switch on the bottom and the inputs/outputs on the side. Very tidy.

Anyway after poking around on the internet I couldn't find any reviews on the device, so I thought I'd put one together myself. Well, it's more of a pros and cons list of things I've noticed during a week's use than a review, but it pretty much covers everything I'd want to have known before buying it.

ALDI Pure 8GB MP4 Player (Based on the Laserco "InterMate MP4 Widescreen Player")
Pros	Cons
Cheap!	NA
Huge, bright, 400x240, 3", 16:9 screen	The screen has been manufactured to be viewed vertically. This means that the viewing angle would be fine if you turned the device 90 degrees and watched it like that. However, because no movies are filmed taller than they are wide, you have to hold the player on a sideways tilt away from you so that both eyes are seeing it from the viewing angle it has been manufactured for (ie: for someone holding the screen vertically/portrait and watching it slightly from above). If you don't know anything about LCD screens and viewing angles all that probably won't mean anything to you, but you will notice that the image looks strange if you try and view a movie on it fully face-on. Max resolution for AVI files is 800x400 and 720x480 for RMVB
FLAC, APE audio support	No OGG support
FM Radio (which you can record from)	NA
FLV SUPPORT!! UNDOCUMENTED FEATURE!!	NA
Inbuilt speaker	Speaker can be very quiet, especially during movies
MicroSD expansion capability	MicroSD expansion capability limited to 2GB
Can read text files (ebooks) while listening to music. Can save bookmarks.	When you scroll down a page in text files (which doesn't actually scroll per se, it just displays the next block of text when you hit the "next" button), the text is reformatted for some unknown reason. This makes it very difficult to pick up where you left off, as you have to scan the screen trying to find the last word you read.
Can change the font colour, font size and background image when reading ebooks	Can only set font size to small or medium, even though it says large should be an option in the manual. Cannot use custom images as backgrounds for reading ebooks.
File transfer and charging via MiniUSB. Drag and drop files. Use device as hard-drive.	NA
Can alter aspect ratio of screen to display movies correctly.	NA
Music can be viewed by Artist, Album or Genre	Music on SDCard is not recognised by the Media Library and therefore cannot be viewed by Artist, Album or Genre and so must be organised via folder structures No playlist support
Uses actual buttons for navigation and not a stupid touch-screen!	Clumsy navigation, especially volume control. You must navigate to the "now playing" screen to adjust the volume, which is then a matter of clicking the "Volume" button, then checking to see that the volume number has turned red which indicates that you can now adjust it up or down with the left and right navigation buttons. However, left adjusts the volume up and right adjusts it down, when you would expect the opposite. And because you use the navigation buttons to adjust the volume, it is easy to accidentally navigate away from the page when you are trying to change the volume. Terrible design. Buttons feel like they may become spongy over time
	Other Anomalies
	If you have no music files on the device and you try to play music, it gives a red exclamation mark warning, but with no accomanying text to tell you what's wrong. I got confused the first few times this happened.
	Audio went out of sync with video on a large sized xvid AVI I tried to play (large as in a 717mb, 608x256, 1hr22min movie) This may be only specific to that one file, since I played another similarly large file and had no problems with it.
	Auto-shutdown activates when music is playing! STUPID! (This feature is meant to shut down the device after a period of inactivity to save batteries)
	Music playback can pause for a fraction of a second while you are navigating through folders on the device.

Although it may look like the negatives outweigh the positives, I haven't stopped using it since I've bought it and I rarely get annoyed with it to the point that I think any of its flaws are "deal-breakers".

There have been reports of "screen flicker" or "diagonal tearing" on the net, but I've watched a fair few movies of all different genres and haven't found this to be a problem at all. In fact, I have found the image quality to be fantastic and smooth. The only video I have noticed the flicker in is the preloaded real media demo video that comes with it. This may be a real media issue, as all the files I have watched have been AVIs.

EDIT: Updated 28th Jan 2009

I thought I'd write an update now that I've had more time to play with it. Some of the things are new, but some of the things have already been mentioned and have just become a bigger issue with time.

Buttons are frustratingly small. And I'm sure they are sitting lower/more flush with the casing than they were.
I'm sure I can hear audio distortion when playing music files at even a low volume. I've heard it while playing them on headphones and speakers. I can't seem to hear it all the time though for some reason.
Speaker is often so quiet as to be useless.
The radio will only play in mono. You are given the option to switch to stereo in a menu, but it doesn't work.
When selecting "continue play" on a video, it continued playing it but without sound (I just found this bug right now while testing another bug!)
Shuffle function only seems to shuffle the first 250 or so tracks (as stated elsewhere on the web).
When hitting the "next" button when in shuffle mode, it plays the immediate next track, not the next randomly selected shuffle track.
I have now seen the video "tearing" people have been talking about. However this has only occurred in one scene in all the movies I have watched, and it was at the start of Cars where there is a close-up of cars zooming by... just blurs basically. It resulted in diagonal tearing.
The volume control is painfully annoying. You actually have to be looking at the screen to make sure you are adjusting the volume (ie you can't just adjust it by putting your hand in your pocket and pushing a button). You are always at least two button pushes away from adjusting the volume.
Finally, when I sent an email to support asking if there was a way to fix the font-size issue in e-books, I never got a response. I think I might try calling them.

Still, even after all that, I can't stop thinking how much of a bargain it is for $99. I still get a lot of enjoyment out of it!