Olympus m:robe MR-500i Digital Music Player with Digital Camera by Olympus
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Digital camera reviews of Olympus m:robe MR-500i Digital Music Player with Digital Camera
Digital camera Review: So much bang for your buck
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow I bought this mp3 player, the 500i, for just $200. It just offers more "special features" than an iPod or Zen series. Overall amazing quality, and here is a part-by-part breakdown:
Looks: Absolutely amazing, very nice, sleek, shiny black. Uber-cool. Slightly bulky, not one you want to take while jogging. You want a flash based mp3 player for that, or perhaps a Nano. But I'm too lazy to jog so I don't have a problem.
Capacity/Hard Drive: 20 GB is quite good when considering all the features that have been crammed in here. But the rpm for the hard drive isn't "up there".
Battery/Charging: What the heck do you expect? It's a full color screen. It's actually amazing battery for that, lasts me 10 hrs (A hold button exists for a reason, people), but if leaving the screen on, it goes down to 2-3 hrs. Max battery capacity is reached by about the third charge, I found. I wish it had a little less wires, and also charged with a computer. But the cradle came free.
Touchscreen: Probably the best part of the whole thing. Very sensitive if you just don't make the mistake my mom makes (lol): use your fingertips not your full finger. Really fun to bust this out on iPod users. Very sweet looking. Also usable as a mirror! :P
Stock headphones: These give some awesome sound! I listen to rock/rap. These headphones give very believable bass, lows, and mids, but not exactly like Sennheisers in treble quality. The reason one side is longer is because it wraps around your head. But a huge problem! These awesome headphones are only around 2-3ft long! They don't even reach from your pants to your ears. Nooooo! Therefore I'm looking at replacements.
Music quality: Absolutely demolishes the iPod or Zen series. Very high signal-to-sound ratio, and instead of just preset equalizers it ALSO includes tweaking by single decibels up to 15 dB in the following: 60Hz, 250Hz, 1kHz, 4kHz, and even 12kHz! Only plays mp3
Remix: Fun little feature to create slideshows, but I found it completely useless. I would just use my computer.
Photo: I believe this is the first mp3 player with a photo. Even though it's Olympus, you do need to keep it very still and it is just 2.1 MP. But don't forget it's just an mp3 player. Another fun little part of this gadget, but it's not gonna replace your Nikon camera. But this baby actually has PictBridge?? LOL
Player interface: This player seems to take longer to start player long songs, leading me to think it preloads the song into memory. The delay for song play is somewhat annoying. The iPod has much faster response, which can be a problem too when switching from gangsta rap to classical. But I'd rather have fast response. Like the new iPods, it does show album covers. Another special feature is that it shows lyrics. Eventually when I'm really bored sometime, I'll put in the lyrics for all my thousand or so songs...
Upload interface: The worst part (sort of) of this player. When I tried to update Mtrip software, it actually crashed on me! 3 times! So I'm just using the original software version. And it takes a long time to transfer songs. You can only run the player on one computer, meaning you can't sync with multiple computers. Problem with this being that with multiple users on one computer, you are forced to clear the player if you update on another user. However, the files themselves are not hidden and can be copy-pasted to other computers, which is a huge asset for when my computer crashed with all my music. All I had to do was rename a thousand files (M000808 renamed to Sandstorm for example) :(
Durability: It has been eight months since my purchase, and I see no scratches on the screen or the camera lens. Even though I don't have any kind of neoprene or any protective casing whatsoever. But I don't think any players are drop-proof and sleek=smooth=sliding so watch out anyway.
I think I should probably stop talking now. Point is, this is value staring you in the face. So what are you going to do about it?
Digital camera Review: Stay away from this player
Summary: 1 Stars
For the short period of time my m:robe actually worked I found the following:
Pro: Cool looks.
Contra: Unreactive user interface---reaction to pushing a button takes forever.
Camera is not much better than a cell-phone camera.
Player doesn't integrate with MS Media Player. Olympus provides some sort of poor-man's Media Player/iTunes application forcing you into reencoding your music collection.
Now to the worst part, Olympus service:
I dropped my m:robe from ~2ft hight while it was in its little pouch. It still played the music I had on it but any new songs would hang the system and only turning it off would help.
This is where my troubles with Olympus' tech-support began. Endless waiting in hot-lines, circular phone menues. I finally sent my m:robe in. Weeks of waiting. In return to my e-mail enquiries I received long form letters without any relevant information about the repair status. They have a website for registered customers that is supposed to show the repair status. Mine never changed. After three months and an other attempt at getting someone on the phone I found out that I was supposed to pay $160 repair. I had the m:robe returned unrepaired (since they sell used for less than $200).
My m:robe was an expensive experiment. Stay away from it.
Digital camera Review: The best mp3 player/touch screen/ camara
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this great mp3 player 3 year ago in amazon.com, It was the best mp3 player of the year and always use it because the interface is very easy to use and the sound quality is extremely amazing. The m trip software provides disks information like author, albums and year. The battery is ok the first years but 3 years of extensive make that my battery loose charge. The camera has the same quality of a cell phone camera but is so useful, the only little problem I find to my m-robe 500i is the size is a little bit big. I think is time to look other mp3 player but is difficult find the replace for this extremely good mp3/touch screen/camera/hard drive/ player.Digital camera Review: Very Cool Interface...
Summary: 5 Stars
In a world with an immense amount of mp3 players.. This one stands out as the 20 gig player that can take pictures and remix them without any extra hardware.. I am really impressed with its build, size, functionality, and quality.. The player on a full charge will last around 9 hours, I suspect the other reviewers did not realize that you need to place this m:robe on standbye for it to conserve energy while its playing music..Digital camera Review: Very fun- very cool
Summary: 4 Stars
The m:robe 500i is a really cool mp3 player. It has some pros and some cons though.
-pros-
great touch screen
great music quality
great screen quality
large screen
decent camera
looks really cool
nice remote
simple controls
easy uploading software
short battery charge
-cons-
poor battery life unless screen is turned off
no flash only photo light
a little big
takes a while to take a picture because of slow loading
In all, the m:robe is a good choice for a mp3 player and very nice b/c it has a camera. But the battery life really needs to extended in a newer version of the product.