Mpio HD200

The Mpio is a nice little unit at a lower cost than rivals of similar sized units.

It supports MP3, WMA, OGG and ASF but it doesnt support encypted DRM music files.Battery life is around seven hours with FM tuner and Dictaphone capability plus direct MP3 encoding.

The Mpio is a dinky little thing and works quite well. Sound is good. Its nice to have radio player and direct MP3 encoding.

Bad point is the navigation. Totally non-intuitive and no instructions in anything resembling English. Mine stopped working during the gurantee period. I mailed it to MPIO and they sent me what appears to be a new one.

The Mpio HD200 is my first MP3 player, and navigation is a nightmare! I did not realize extra buttons were so undesirable in manufacturing, it has only 3 buttons to control everything (volumne is a 4th button). It probably needs a couple more buttons to avoid having buttons with multiple effects depending of how you engage them. It's gotten so frustrating, I look at it sitting there and have to ask myself if I really want to use it, am I ready to suffer through the navigation to get it playing what I want? Sometimes the answer is no! Is that a proper attitude to have with such a wonderful little machine? I've only had it a week or so and I'm wondering if the MPIO bigger brother is what I should have bought as the controls are different and it may be better for a person such as me that has little, no, very little patience for poor design. You can get all set up and unwittingly pick it up or touch it wrong and bang, back to frustration. It is by no means intuitive. In fact, the average joe couldn't even turn it on without being told how and after that step, it gets worse. The features are great if only you could easily access them. I don't know much about computers and software but I managed to get onto MPIO's website and downloaded firmware upgrades successfully without much problem, that's saying something! That feature could be worth it's weight in gold, I am blown away that MPIO have designed it to be upgraded like that, they are brilliant. This gives me hope that someday MPIO will improve navigation but I'm not sure how without more buttons to work with. I have noticed wee improvements already with the newer firmware release, added icons and it does not crash as often as it did with it's supplied firmware version 1.0. In summary I guess you noticed all I've talked about is in reference to navigation, and that is the wrench in the works, everything else about this puppy is wonderfull. Everything! I will offer another review after being more familiar with it.

I bought this MPIO HD200 player hoping that it would work seemlessly with my Linux box. For the most part it does except that in order to use the music browsing capabilities, you need to run a windows only utility program.

I tried to contact Mpio about this issue and the only contact info I could find was their webmaster's email address. This of course got me nowhere.

Other than that, this is a sweet player. Perfect size, great sound quality, battery life, and user interface. I like the scroll button on the side much better than the ipod touch pad.

I opted for the MPIO HD200 after spending a little longer looking around for an mp3 player somewhere between the flash and harddrive size. I'm glad I did as I found the MPIO HD200 to have more useful features like the FM radio and record along with a whole host of different sound settings. It's the sound which really impresses with setting like trubass and SRS, WOW you can really play around. This player is cheaper than it's rivals, sounds better, has more features and a longer battery life. The only thing it doesn't have is the hype and marketing around it.

I used to have an mpio fl100 which was a great mp3 player but I needed more storage so I bvought the MPIO HD200. Getting the MPIO HD200 was a natural upgrade as it's got 5GB of storage which I've managed to get most of my album collection on around 150 albums. I've got to say when you first press play your blown away by the sound of this player. Playing around with all the various sound settings like SRS and WOW and the different speaker variations is a pleasure in itself. Because I'm used to navigating with the fl100 it's a similar method but the larger big screen and icons make it easier especially with so much music in it.

I've used the radio quite a lot and it's crystal clear.

I've not tried the direct encoding feature but I've seen it encodes up to 192KBPS straight from your hi-fi. I suppose if you were sick of using the computer at work or wanted go around to friends house and rip a few CD's then the options there.

I've also found it's useful for transporting and storing very large 500MB + files from work. It acts like a USB storage device.

I'm glad I bought this player rather than the Mini iPod which costs more and has less features. I found mine on google for under £160.