BenQ Joybee DP 200 review

The Joybee DP200 is a dinky little Flash memory-based MP3 player that you can hang around your neck like a medallion.

MP3 players that use Flash memory to store music have been around for years now. Although they hold far less music than players containing tiny hard disks, such as the Rio Nitrus or Apple's iPod, they have several advantages: they're cheaper, and because they contain no moving parts they don't skip if you shake them. Flash memory players also tend to be much smaller than hard disk players - and the DP 200 is one of the smallest we've seen. It's about the size of a large watch face and less than a centimetre thick. It weighs next to nothing, too, and is designed to be worn around the neck using its special headphones.

This medallion-like design may not appeal to everyone, but it might suit those who don't want to carry their music player in their hand while exercising. Unfortunately, you don't have much choice in the matter. There's no way of clipping the Joybee to your belt, for instance. What's more, the player has a tiny, proprietary headphone socket that's too small to accomodate normal headphones, so you're stuck with BenQ's round-the-neck design whether you like it or not.

This same small socket is used to connect the DP 200 to your PC in order to transfer music. Again, this is a bit annoying - lose BenQ's special cable, and you're in a fix. The player appears as a standard removable drive in Windows, though, so at least it's easy to use with ordinary music-playing software such as iTunes.

This same cable also recharges the DP 200's battery. We reckon BenQ's claim of a 10-hour battery life is a little optimistic, but the DP 200 played happily through our daily commute for a few days.

The BenQ's sound quality is good. Treble is clear and crisp. Bass, while not exactly thumping, is not muffled. It's when you push one of the DP 200's track skip buttons that the biggest problem becomes apparent: when you move between tracks the player makes a 'chirrup' sound, like a cricket. At first, this is amusing, but after skipping tracks a few times it soon becomes annoying.

If you want a player for enegetic pursuits such as jogging, and you don't mind the around-your-neck design and the cricket noises, the tiny, high-quality DP 200 is a decent MP3 player. For everyone else, though, our current Top 50, the Rio Nitrus, is a much better buy. It sounds good, is almost as robust as Flash-based players and stores 12 times as much music as the Joybee can.