MSI has a serious Ipod nano contender

WE HAD a chance to see one of the first prototypes of MSI's soon to arrive P610 MP3 player.

We played with it back at the Digital Consumer Channel conference in St Wolfgang, Austria. You can read about out first experience here.

Our biggest objection to the first P610 that we saw was the display. It turned out that the prototype was not the final thing and that the final product has a much better display than the first one. MSI P610 is the real attacker on the Ipod. A 1GB version should sell for around €99 and it is available now, or soon, depending on the country.

The retail box is as wide as a CD. It includes an MSI P610 player, a manual CD, quick guide, line in cable that will help you connect this player to your car stereo or any kind of speakers, and stereo mini in ear headphones. It also includes a small and nice USB 2.0 cable. This MP3, Video, Radio player and data carrier weighs only 45 grammes and is as thin as the Ipod Nano. The test version had 1GB while there are 2GB and 4GB versions slated for the future. It is just 8.5 millimetre thick, 90 millimetres long and 40.5 millimetres wide.

It clearly has a bigger display than the Ipod Nano and is packed in a shiny chrome metal case. It looks and feels very robust and when polished you can use the back side as a mirror. It's a girlie thing, but why not. The front side is dominated by the display that is bright enough and will show a decent picture.

Navigation is very intuitive. You use seven front buttons to navigate. You don't even need to RTFM, you can just open it and use it. It takes some 15 seconds to boot the device and as soon as it is booted you can instantly start to use it. All you need is to firmly press the power button, wait for two seconds to see the boot screen, wait for thirteen more and you are ready to rock and roll whichever music religion you preach.

There are also two side buttons. The left hand button will repeat the selected part of the song and can possibly be useful. It will also trigger the recording as the device has the integrated microphone. If you want to record some stuff from line in you just plug your external microphone or any other device to your headphones port who acts as the line in at the same time. At the same time the player is the recording device, nice and useful. The right hand side button will lock your player if you are caring it in the pocket in order to avoid the un necessary song skipping, shutting down or good knows what else can happen if the device is unlocked.

Naturally you can play MP3 and WMA on this device and all you need to do is to drag and drop them and they will play. It is the beauty of this device and the Creative devices. The same goes with the videos and pictures and you can even read the notes on your MP3 player. The bottom side hides a neck stripe mini USB port and a mini stereo headphones jack. You connect your player on USB and via USB 2.0 you can transfer the files really fast.

When it comes to music you can play your MP3 and you can play a play lists. This part is very nicely done but every single time we turned to player on we had to adjust the volume as it would tune itself down to some default level. I am sure that MSI can fix it with a firmware update.

Music is clear and loud and that's what we cared about. You can also easily make a playlists and listen to them later, it also easy to edit the lists and to delete the files. You have to press the left top button for two second to get the add to playlist feature, that is the catch. The player shows the informations about to song you play, the album name and the artists, you of course get some kind of funny looking equalizer graph and the time of the song. You can see the clock at all time and what is the song number in the playlist or directory or album.

Second nice feature is the picture player. It can play Jpeg up to massive 8 Mega pixels and it works really well. I liked the fact that the device can play MP3 and you can view and show your pictures at the same time. That is a very nice feature, as the player is really multitasking.

There is a slideshow with some wipes between pictures and this is also a nice feature. You can rotate the pictures by pressing the top left button for two second as they will fit the screen much better. We wanted to zoom but the option is absent. The device can also make a preview of a bunch of small thumbnail pictures and will show the time at the same time. You can make a puzzle out of your picture and play with it, it can be fun.

Video looks nice and even the screen is tiny you can watch some videos if you are bored or you are travelling. It works really nice we can not complain much about it but jet again you can not zoom in the video or manipulate it.

The forth feature of this player is the radio. It takes a few second to scan for radio channels and we were able to find fifteen channels. Not all of them were clear and you could not change the names of the channels and there is no RDS support which is a shame. You can save your favourite channels and do the scan again if you want.

You can also read notes a TXT and LRC files and this might be useful to keep some info on in text format on the player. It talks five hours to fully charge the battery and about three hours to charge the 80 percent of it. The browser option will let you find a file and the player will decide weather it should start picture, mp3, notes or video player. This is a nice and neat feature.

The settings menu has support for lyrics as the player can display them, SRS surround sound emulation, it has the equalizer with a few predefined presents you can set the song repeat. You can chose how and in which format and quality you want to save your recordings and is the source line in or internal microphone. You can also set the radio region and you can chose between the Japan and the world, how biuzare is that. You can also set the power down option if you forget to shut your player down and you can set the interval, repeat or transitions of the slides. You can tune backlight, brightness language, date and time, and see the info about your player.

In Short
With ten plus hours playback and great dimensions, larger display than Ipod nano and far more capable it should be the MP3 player that you should consider. People still has to learn about MSI as the retail brand as every single of my friends asked me what does MSI stands for. The branding on the player is very noticeable and people will learn about it, just give them a time.

The P610 player is fifty percent cheaper than Ipod nano and has much more features. It is the player that worth €99. MSI will certainly update the firmware and fix some of the child sickness we found about the device and we are already working with MSI to fix these small thingies. ?