MP3 Player: BenQ Joybee 720

On paper, the BENQ Joybee 720 reads like the wishlist of any keen, young, mp3-toting ipod wannabe: good looks and small form factor; a colour screen to view your photos on the move; 5GB of storage; 10 hours of battery life; support for all major music formats and a radio to boot. But when you look a little closer, devastatingly serious cracks start to appear in what could have been a serious contender in the increasingly crowded hard drive based MP3 player market.The physical form factor is probably it’s strongest selling point – the device looks quite sleek, fits in your hand very comfortably and is easily small and light enough to take jogging or to the gym for a workout. The buttons weren’t placed in the most intuitive positions in my opinion, but all up the physical design is excellent, and the fact that it has a removable, user replaceable battery with 10 hours of playback and USB charging doesn’t hurt either.  One of the Joybee’s more interesting and best executed features is the SD / MMC card slot neatly fitted into the side of the device. This won’t mean much to anyone who doesn’t have a digital camera that uses the SD memory card format, but for those that do, it essentially means that you can use the Joybee as a portable mass-storage device for your photos. Insert the card and all files are automatically copied onto the Joybee’s hard drive. It’s even smart enough to save the mp3s from your memory card into a separate folder to the photos. I tested it with a 32 MB card and even that took a while to copy over so if you have a high capacity card, be prepared to wait. The sound quality was actually quite good when you attach a decent set of headphones, although the lack of gapless playback was a drawback (but similar to the iPod). Volume is adequate without ever threatening to get loud. I never had the volume on anything less than 90%, so if you have to listen to your tunes in a noisy environment you might have some issues. At 160×128 pixels, the screen is identical in size to that of the ipod photo, however, in the unit I was given for testing, the screen’s backlight bled in on the left and right, bleaching out the sides of the screen slightly. The screen also stays on the whole time, even when in hold mode, which is sure to drain the battery much faster than necessary. The Joybee lets you browse photos on the screen 6 at a time, but it takes a lot of time to display the six preview images (about 2.5 seconds per image) and then about 5 seconds to display each image after you select it. I was testing with jpeg images taken on a 4 Megapixel camera at about 1MB in size each. If I was listening to MP3s while viewing images, it took around 70 seconds to display the six preview images. Then you were up for another 10-15 seconds to enlarge each image as you select it. It does allow you to zoom in on images, but is unbearably slow to respond when viewing a 1MB image. As you can probably tell, the amount of time taken to view your pictures on the device makes this feature virtually unusable, especially if you’re thinking about listening to music AND viewing photos. If you have to wait over a minute to view one picture, then it just isn’t worth it, and god help you if you want to view the 20th photo in your list! You can create slide shows to show to people on the device itself, but without any outputs to display the photos on an external monitor, I found little point to this feature.My hat goes off to BENQ for including an FM Radio on the Joybee 720, it was always a welcome addition to a discman and the same goes for today’s mp3 players. Best intentions aside, I found that the reception was pretty weak and I needed to hold the headphone cord up in the air to get a decent signal without static. You can choose to manually tune the radio or go to a list of user defined presets. Unfortunately, when listening to a preset station, there’s no easy way to channel surf between your presets – the FFWD and RWD buttons act as manual tuning, so the only way to switch presets is to go back to the preset menu (which switches off the radio) and select another one from there. This felt counter intuitive and needlessly complicated to me. The real test of any large capacity MP3 player is the ease with which you can browse through the interface to find and play your music. With several players already on the market with rich, intuitive and enjoyable interfaces, there’s little room for a player that doesn’t come up to scratch in the usability department. The first thought that came into my head when I switched on the Joybee 720 for the first time was “I thought this thing had a colour screen?” It does actually have a colour screen, but to say they hadn’t exactly taken advantage of colour in the interface would be a huge understatement. Besides the time in the top left hand corner and the ‘time remaining’ status bar in play mode (both primary blue), the rest of the interface is completely black and white and very low resolution, despite having more than adequate hardware to provide smooth graphics and a dazzling array of colours. While pictures are rendered smoothly in colour, the rest of the interface is like some terrible port of a 1980s commodore 64 game: cumbersome, ugly and virtually monochrome. Starting up the device (which takes 20 seconds itself) will present you with the following menu options: Music; Photos; FM; Erase File; Setup; System Info; Refresh DB. The music sub menu allows you to search by title, artist, genre, folder and playlist; and also to create, delete or edit a playlist. However I couldn’t find a way to import playlists from your computer. It was easy enough to load MP3s onto the Joybee – just plug it into your computer and it shows up as a removable drive in windows explorer, then it was simply a matter of drag and drop to get the files you want onto the device. Before you can actually see your music on the Joybee, you need to run the ‘Refresh DB’ process to allow the Joybee to reindex the files, which took me up to a minute with only a few hundred megs of mp3s on there.In order to find your music on the device, you can search by title, artist, genre or folder, but it sorts each of these automatically by track name, instead of something sensible like track number. This means it plays all your CDs in the wrong order. The manual says that to get it to sort by anything other than track name, you need to refresh the whole database each time you want to change the sort order, but after trying this I couldn’t notice any difference. You can create playlists to sort tracks in the order you want, but the only way to do so is to create the list manually on the device itself, which is cumbersome and slow and then there is no way to name the playlist!Being able to browse the folders on the device is a useful feature because you don’t have to rely on your ID3 tags in order to find your music. However, don’t get carried away creating long folder names, because if the folder name is too long for the screen, then the Joybee will scroll the folder name at an agonisingly slow 1 letter every 2 seconds. So if I had a folder named: ’\Music\2 Many DJs\As Heard on Radio Soulwax pt 8’, it would take over a minute before I had seen the entire folder name.   For me, the most infuriating feature of the device was the click and hold method you have to use to move through the menus – to go down a menu, you click mode, to move back up a menu, you click and hold the same mode button down for 2 seconds, which can mean if you’re 5 menus deep, it takes at least 10 seconds to get back to the top again. This is completely unnecessary considering there are 5 other buttons that could be put to use and it makes moving swiftly around the device impossible. To say that I was frustrated and disappointed with the BENQ Joybee 720 doesn’t even come close. The saddest part is that, on hardware specs alone, it does have the potential to be a great player, but fails abysmally in the software and usability department. It’s almost as if BENQ did absolutely no user acceptance testing at all and simply tacked together a great feature list without realizing they have to couple these with a solid and enjoyable user interface. As it stands, the interface is barely ready for beta testing and, in my opinion, is not at a level where it should be released into the general public at large. The only upside to this is that the player is firmware upgradeable, so all these problems could be fixed with a major firmware upgrade from BENQ. Lets hope they can produce this, and soon. Rating: 2 out of 5

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