Goodmans GMP31G7DAB review

Gallery

Verdict:

At last - the MP3 player that looks like a giant dodgy 1980s digital watch! The price is reasonable if DAB radio is important to you, but the player has too many flaws.

Review Date: 20 Jul 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Ben Pitt

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Three things make Goodmans' MP3 player stand out.

The most obvious is its inexcusably ugly, bulky design - it looks more like your old PE teacher's stopwatch than a modern MP3 player. Second, it's seriously expensive for a 1GB model. However, its saving grace (and some excuse for the size) is the inclusion of a DAB radio. Tuning to digital broadcasts, this offers more stations and less interference than the FM radios built into other MP3 players.

With 15 poorly labelled buttons and a sluggish menu system, accessing radio stations and MP3s is slow and, at times, confusing. There's a dedicated Record button for the voice recorder, but we found ourselves pressing it by accident more often than on purpose. Worst of all, album tracks are played in alphabetical order, and adding the track number to the beginning of MP3 file names (as most encoding software can do) doesn't help. Playback fades in the beginnings of tracks, often lopping off the first chord, and USB transfers are painfully slow at 0.45Mbit/sec. The supplied headphones have decent bass, but the player itself is slightly lacking in audio clarity.

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