Sweex Blue Bay 4GB review

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Verdict:

The Blue Bay has a low price for such a high-capacity player, and sounds great. If you can put up with the fiddly interface and naming your audio files so that they play in the right order, this a good buy.

Review Date: 19 Sep 2007

Price when reviewed: £50

Supplier: http://www.misco.co.uk

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

This 4GB version of Sweex's Blue Bay MP3 player offers a lot of space for a small, cheap drive. If you don't want to spend £50 on a basic MP3 player, the 2GB version is available for around £30.

While the Blue Bay may not be as eye-catching as Sweex's Pretty Pink MP3 player (Labs, Shopper February 2007), the design is similar. A mono LCD screen allows you to navigate your music. The scroll wheel acts as a select button when pressed, and can bring up various menus depending on how long you press it. We found this awkward to use. The player doesn't have a menu-based file browser, so you can skip tracks only one at a time.

The Blue Bay is powered by one AAA battery, and managed to play for 10 hours, 16 minutes on an alkaline battery. An integrated microphone enables this player to double as a voice recorder.

This version of the Blue Bay player comes with a pair of Sennheiser MX300 headphones (lower-capacity versions don't). The headphones are excellent, and both they and the player performed well in our bass and treble tests. Our only major complaints are that the Blue Bay plays tracks in filename order rather than track number order, and transferring 500MB of data took almost 15 minutes.

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