Alameda Runners – Get After It!

If you are buying a 4gb mp3 player with a camera and tuner for $22, you better bring your sense of humor with you.  I bought my eSport for $30.  I should have gone to Walmart and picked one up for $22 but it was worth extra money to not have to go to Walmart.  I have nothing against Walmart.  It is just the time it takes to get to the store, find the item, then pay for it, do not make it worth the trip to save $8.

Back to the review.  Since I had my sense of humor handy, I decided to get the pink model.  I like the color.  I think it sets my dark running shorts off nicely.

When I plugged the player into my computer, it worked!  It actually started to charge.  To make things better, my Linux Mint operating system recognized it.  I was so shocked my mouse hand went numb!  I opened up a random music folder and dropped the whole thing into the mp3 folder and the player took it.  When I looked at the folder, it contained both mp3 and ogg files.  Ogg is the open source music format.  Since it took the music so easily, I got cocky and drug an avi file over to see what would happen.  To my surprise, all of the music played.  As an added bonus, the Japanese music showed up on the display in Kanji.  The video did not work because I did not resize it.

The music player worked.  The buttons are extremely clunky but navigation is possible.  The player comes with a cheap little speaker that works.  It is kind of neat to clip it onto the back of my bike jersey and listen to poor quality music.  When I am going up the side of a mountain, it is nice to have a tempo to help set a pace.  I don’t really listen to the music but the tempo is there.  I listened to the player through some Bose headphones with satisfactory results.  It was not like listening to the music from a PC with a $200 sound card but the sound was okay.

The video camera works.  With 4gb of available memory, you can record for a while.  The camera works.  It has a flash but I am not sure it does anything.  Half the time when I take a picture, I am not sure if I took the picture or not.  ¾ of the time when I take a picture, I am not sure if I am in the camera mode.  The pictures and video transfer to my computer by drag and drop.

I am currently using it as my car mp3 player.  It has about 6 hours of battery use and still going strong.  When I turn it off and back on, it remembers the track it was playing.  Every time I throw it back into its hole for the trip, it changes the song from the touchy controls that are only sensitive when you don’t want them to do anything.

Pros:

It is cheap
It works!
Very easy file transfer
Plays variable formats, mp3, wav and ogg.  I did not feel like looking for Apple files to drag over.
Lots of memory storage
Expandable memory
Nice colors
Comes with a cool video about a rabbit

Cons:

It is cheap
It is slow
Navigation is frustrating
I can’t figure out where the buttons are located
It is big

Final grade – Pass

It is a $30 mp3 player.  It does what I want and some extra stuff.  It is easy enough to figure out.  I did not read the instructions and managed just fine.  The buttons do not work very well but they get the job done.  I will not cry when it breaks.  I bought a cheap mp3 player so I could sweat all over it and not cry when I get caught out in the rain.  Remember your sense of humor when use something like this.