New! MCody 20 GB MP3 player.........

29/06/06

You buy the Mcody M-20 for two reasons; sound quality and design. This player isn’t stuffed full of features. It can’t play movies. It can’t download files from digital cameras. It doesn’t have a colour screen. What it can do, it does very, very well. It is quite simply one of the most stylish MP3 players currently on the market. Switched off, the whole front surface of the MP3 player is completely black – no buttons, no visible screen – you wouldn’t even know that it was an MP3 player. Minimalist design at its best.

Switched on, the player transforms itself with glowing touch sensitive red buttons which reveal on the lower part of the player, and white text from the reverse OLED screen almost magically appears from the gloss black surface of the player. Since it’s only a wafer 7.5mm thin and 30.5 grams in weight, it really is ultra portable and can glide comfortably into any pocket. The white OLED screen features ultra smooth scrolling, so it’s very easy to read. The touch sensitive buttons are actually very intuitive and don’t take long to get used to. It’s a case of gently tapping the player’s controls or tapping and holding to scroll faster.

It may look sublime, but that’s pretty useless if the sound quality doesn’t live up to such high standards. The Mcody doesn’t disappoint with 40mW sound output (20mW per channel) – that’s more than many hard drive MP3 players. Sound quality is obviously powerful but well balanced too. We tested the player with a pair of Shure e3c earphones and the player delivered accurate, precise audio output with balanced bass performance. Sound enhancement technologies including SRS Wow 3D Sound and TruBass enhance the audio experience further.

The Mcody M-20 supports all of the major audio formats including MP3, WMA, WAV and OGG Vorbis files. The manufacturer has also somehow managed to squeeze in an FM tuner with 20 presets, FM recorder, voice recorder and direct line-in MP3 recording. The FM tuner is perhaps this player’s only slight weakness – it picked up 3 – 4 radio stations in our tests with a good signal, which is about average based on our tests with other MP3 players. The voice recording and direct MP3 encoding functions work perfectly – if you pulled this player out in an office to record a meeting or during a lecture, you’d be sure to get some admiring glances!

Battery life is 11 hours via the internal lithium polymer battery – charged quickly via USB. No one is left out, the Mcody M-20 supports PC, Mac and Linux based computers and appears simply as a removable disk drive when connected to your PC – just drag and drop files to the player.

Sublime style. Powerful sound output. Amazing form factor. The Mcody M-20 is a truly impressive synergy of form and function. Available exclusively from Advanced MP3 Players in the UK.

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