Mercury KOB MP-250

I bought this mp3 player about 4 months ago at futureshop for 30 bucks. I was in the market for an mp3 player, and I didn't have too much cash, so this did the job there. I brought it home, and immediatly started filling it with music, although 64mb only goes so far, it still has enough memory for an hour and a half of music at the right bitrate and encoder. If you use the wma encoder at 96kbps variable bitrate, it's hard to notice quality sacrifice. With mp3 though, do not go lower than 128kbpp, 112kbps BARE MINIMUM, it's very noticable on this. There is also an EQ on it! There's pop, rock, jazz, and classic, plus OFF, and I take it that they count that as one too.

This model has a nice look and feel to it. You can use it with just one hand, left or right, and also because of the track skip/search button, it's easy to navigate to the song you want. There are 6 buttons, 3 along the top, and 3 along the bottom. With these you must be carefull! I had accidentally dropped mine from a table to the concrete floor in my basement, and the EQ/REC button popped off. I was able to get it back in, but I broke one of the clips, and now it slides back and forth with the lock switch, however it seems to be working fine.

The first time I put some music on it, I realized I had messed up with the file names, so rather than rename all 25 songs. I just formatted and re-made the songs. I realized then that the player was acting funny. It would just all of a sudden, lock up or stop playing and corrupt all the songs on the player, so I read through the manual, and it said to load the software in 98 but not in ME/2000/XP. I loaded the software anyway, and formatted with the software provided by mercury, and that fixed the problem. Now it works great!

If your in the market for an mp3 player, I recommend you get a cheap one at first, because more money doesn't always mean higher quality. The more features, the more to go wrong IMO, so I recommend this mp3 player, and so far 6 of my friends have bought one of these. You can find one on ebay now for around 1 - 20 bucks. They're a good deal, almost a steal at 1 buck IMO.