Suma’s Neon MP3 Player: Challenging The Diamond Rio – THG.RU

<!–#set var="article_header" value="Suma's Neon MP3 Player:
Challenging The Diamond Rio” –>

Introduction

The music industry is attacking the popular MP3 music format on a regular basis, now trying to introduce their own music standard – charged with fees of course. However, nobody can deny those impressive features of MP3 like high sound quality at comparatively low data storaging requirements. These are the main reasons why the MP3 format is now widely used in more and more areas of our everyday life.

Yet, it’s hard to estimate the sales quantities for hifi devices with MP3 support, since most users still prefer their computer for playback. On the mobile sector, the story is completely different. Thanks to the fact that there is no need for conventional media such as tapes or CDs, such players can live with only a memory chip, decoder chip and a battery. As there are no moving parts, the wearout is practically zero. Quite important also is the design and the weight.

The Neon wants to break into this niche by providing decent features with four different colour schemes.

The Neon In Detail

This little guy is absolutely uncomplicated and ultra-portable. The dynamic style is particularly very attractive. Also the package is non-standard, as Suma ships the player inside a cool aluminium can. You will find some ear phones, a USB cable, a webbing, a CD and a little bag inside.

The good contrasted display has three lines and can also be read at poor light proportions. The first line will show you the artist, line two names the title and below that you will see the play time. To show artist and title correctly, the Neon will need MP3 tags. If they shouldn’t be available, the player will display the track (or file) name. Unfortunately, the display is limited to 30 characters. If some name is longer, the exceeding characters it will be chopped off. At the top of the display you will also find an indicator for the battery status, volume level and the track number.

Most people will be able to use the Neon player even without looking into the comprehensive manual, as all functions can be used intuitively. There is, for example, treble and bass fine tuning, random and shuffle play and the option to alter contrast.

Suma abandoned all kinds of gimmicks – that’s something which helps to keep the handling easy. Too many options would complicate use of the Neon. In addition, only a few people really make use of toy-functions. The manufacturer also cut off the option to set up personal play lists. Even the software doesn’t give you any option to do this.

It took about 90 seconds to fill the memory of 64 MB using the USB cable. That is approximately 700 KB/s. You can upgrade the data capacity by 16, 32 or 64 MB by using a Smart Media card. This kind of storage solution is more commonly used in digital photo cameras. At an average 4 minutes per title, the Neon will hold approximately 16 titles with 64 MB of memory.

The Neon In Detail, Continued

Due to our mixed experiences with ear phones included with other MP3 players, we did not expect too much from those shipped with the Neon – absolutely the right decision, since the ear phones will easily fall out if you move your head too fast. The difference with higher quality hifi head phones ($ 40 or more) is like changing a Beetle to a BMW 3 series. In my opinion, quality ear phones are at least as important as the amount of memory. Thus I strongly recommend you to purchase some decent head phones at the same time.

Installing and using the copy program is very easy. You cannot make mistakes, but Suma also did not implement anything but the function to upload, rename and erase MP3 files. Luckily you may still change the title order.

Conclusion

Diamond’s Rio and the Neon from Suma are technically quite similar, as both quality and capacity are pretty much the same. A buying decision can by reduced to two factors: First the buying should be a matter of design and the included utility.

Suma offers four different colour schemes and more equipment than Diamond. Second you should take a look at the available functions. Suma’s Neon tries to convince you by being plain and simple. The size of both players is almost the same; also the difference in weight is hardly worth being mentioned.

Suma sent us three URLs where you should be able to get the Neon player. The first two seem to be suited for resellers, while the last one is a Canadian online shop.

http://www.cyberhome.com.hk/MP3 Player/Neon-MP3.htm (Hong Kong)

http://www.enpia.co.kr (Korea)

http://www.pccool.com (Canada)