Acer MP-330 (10 GB) Review

Overall Rating

This is a good unit.

A few, but overall a good unit.

The Acer MP-330 is quite a good unit, with plenty of space on the 10GB hard drive. It has the features I need: voice recording in MP3 format with line-in and built-in microphone; large capacity; large display; plus, I managed to find one for £50 at Comet in January 2007.

There are some useful features (see list below). Most impressive are the decent replay sound quality, excellent battery life (both in use, and in storage), decent back-light, and ability to act as USB host. It is reasonably good-looking, with good quality (plastic) casing and an appealing large LCD screen.

I have had some problems with the quality and the ergonomics.

- Every now and then, the power button has stopped working; and some of the other controls have had intermittent failure.
- The headphone socket has started to cut out and I now have to wiggle the headphone jack a bit to get stereo sound (I have looked after this unit very carefully).
- The file system is poor, surprisingly since Acer is a computer manufacturer. They have put FAT-32 on this hard drive which means files are played in the (random) order in which my PC copies them across, and not alphabetical or numeric order. I have tracked down a PC tool that works around this but it's a big pain.
- There is not enough control over the backlight, nor over the auto power-off; you can't shuffle play across the whole disk, only within one album; also you can't re-start a track from where you stopped, if the power goes down (which it does after 5 minutes; the work-around is to leave it in 'A-B repeat' mode).
- When listening to long tracks (i.e. over 6 minutes) I find there is electrical interference affecting the sound, as the unit starts to access the hard drive.
- When recording on the built-in mic, which is hissy, my unit records the hard-drive spin-up noise at the start, and develops an electrical whine over time (e.g. 20 mins). The line-in has much better record quality.
- I have found it hard to get support... the unit doesn't even seem to be mentioned on Acer's own website.
- The LCD is basic and monochrome, and for many people the unit would be far too big - but if you're fashion conscious then you're probably not looking at Acer anyway. Features:
- 10GB hard drive
- MP3 or WMA playback, up to 320 Mbps
- MP3 record at 44KHz/160Kbps; 44/128; 32/112
- record from built-in mic, or line-in
- USB host to swop files with other devices
- A-B repeat
- keylock
- equaliser settings; speed variation settings
- long life battery (built-in)
- track/directory repeat or random