MP3 Player: Olympus M:Robe 100

If you’re in the market for a mini-sized mp3 player, but want an alternative to the ubiquitous iPod, then until recently you weren’t exactly spoiled for choice if you didn’t want to sacrifice style for functionality. The M:Robe 100 is Olympus’s first entry into the hard-drive based MP3 player market, in direct competition with the iPod mini. It stacks up fairly well against the competition: for $349, you get 5GB of storage and roughly the same feature set, but if you’re looking for unique style, the kitschy-cool character of the M:Robe may just give it an edge. The device itself is a combination of luminous red-backlit buttons and red screen which has a great visual impact – it reminds me of kitschy space invaders games I used to play when I was a kid in the 80s. The build quality is really high and you get a real sense of quality when handling the device. The face is black, highly polished and glass-like in appearance, surrounded by a stainless steel rim and the rear is encased in white painted metal, so there’s very little plastic to crack if you were to drop it. The form factor is great too, it’s a size that fits in your hand comfortably and the controls are easy to access and manipulate with one hand. Similar to the iPod with it’s iTunes companion, you have to use the supplied M:Trip software to load songs onto the M:Robe, you can’t just drag and drop using windows explorer or the device won’t recognize your files. Being the optimistic sort, I learned this the hard way. The M:Trip software is fairly painless though, it found all the music on my hard drive and loaded the tracks I wanted onto the M:Robe with ease and finesse. The M:Robe employs touch sensitive buttons and a strip on the front of the player that allows you to scroll up and down through menus to find and play the music you want. The controls are easily some of the best I’ve seen, and made it easy and intuitive to navigate throughout the interface. The Main Menu allows you to select predefined playlists, browse through your music by Artists, Albums, Tracks, Genres, Composers and Year, as well as adjusting music settings, including a set of predefined Equaliser settings to choose from. Unfortunately there’s no on-the-fly playlisting, or folder browsing, which are two features I really missed having on the device. One other annoyance was that when browsing through your music, if the track names were too long to fit on the screen, it doesn’t scroll them, making it impossible to tell the difference between a few different albums I had loaded. It only supports MP3 and WMA, which are the only two formats I use anyway. Olympus claim you get 12 hours of MP3 playback and 8 for WMA, which seemed to be about on par with the battery life I saw. Sound quality is okay when you hook up a decent pair of headphones to the M:Robe. It was far from blowing me away, but this is the compromise you make in a mini sized payer.  A compromise you shouldn’t have to make in any player though, is volume level, and this was the M:Robe’s biggest problem. Even when listening to it at the office, I could barely hear it below 90% volume, so it had no chance in a noisy environment. I’m told the latest firmware upgrade fixes this problem so that the volume level is more than adequate, but I didn’t get a chance to test this before I had to return the unit. If you’re worried about volume level, definitely check out the latest firmware download from the Olympus website. The M:Robe doesn’t support gapless playback, but neither do most of the players on the market. There is an EQ, but only in the form of presets: bass boost/cut, mid boost/cut, hi boost/cut, electronica, rock, pop, jazz, etc, but no custom EQ. I didn’t find these presets particularly useful – when you hit ‘bass boost’ it doesn’t sound as if it actually boosts the bass, rather it seems to just turn the other frequencies down. Once again, the volume correction in the latest firmware may fix this problem.The combination of style and functionality in the Olympus M:Robe 100 makes it a really attractive player. Personally I loved the look and feel of the hardware and user interface, plus the only real problem I had with it is supposed to have been fixed by the latest firmware upgrade. Unique styling in mp3 players is definitely in short supply these days, so if you value your individuality, definitely give this one a look.

You need to be logged in to add comments... Login Now

There are 0 user comments