MP3 Hard Drive To Portability

12. Conclusion - A Value For The Money

After our evaluation of the DMP-HD610 Roq-it, we can say that we feel this is a very good MPE player for its price. Although it was not the smallest, lightest, slickest, or sexiest hard drive-based MP3 player available, the DMP-HD610 offers a lot of 'bang' for the buck.

The price tag is right on target for what we would expect to pay for a 10 GB hard drive-based MP3 player. With a suggested retail price of $230 US, it is nearly half the retail price of the iPod. The DMP-HD610's available hard drive upgradeability is a bonus feature that isn't available with other hard drive-based MP3 players.

The battery life in our testing averaged 4 hours, 55 minutes, which is far less than that of the Apple iPod, but we still consider the DMP-HD610 battery life to be good. Twice in the three continuous battery 'run down' tests that we conducted we were able to break over five hours, which we felt was very acceptable for this unit; but, of course, everyone is always clamoring for longer battery life. By way of comparison, Apple claims that the iPod has over ten hours of continuous playback battery life.

We feel that the DMP-HD610 Roq-it is not a good MP3 choice for users who want music "on the go" in active sports situations. As with any device that uses a hard drive, when you move the drive around a lot, or if you subject the drive to bumps and shock, you run the risk of crashing it. In our testing, we found that, by shaking the DMP-HD610 unit very aggressively, we were able to make the music on the player skip, even though the unit has 2 MB of RAM for Electronic Skip Protection. Worse yet, when running with the DMP-HD610, we experienced more seek problems with the hard drive and it skipped, as well. We think that this is because the rapid movement causes the hard drive to have problems getting positioned for the selection process. When connected in a car and going down the road and over a few bumps, we didn't encounter any problems, but if you were to go "off road" with the DMP-HD610, we believe that you would experience the same kind of problems with the unit that we did when shaking it and running with it. Solid-state players that use flash memory are the only players that are not going to skip, and these players are still limited by their relatively small storage capacities.

We found the DMP-HD610 user interface to be not as full-featured or easy-to-use as other units in the MP3 player hard drive world. Due to the fact that the DMP-HD610 is flash upgradeable, we hope that D-Link will continue to improve and make additions to the user interface. The limited and unsophisticated playlist control is a drawback that we would like to see improved upon by D-Link, as well. We would also like to see additional codec support for other music formats in future upgrades. (The DMP-HD610 is restricted to MP3 & MP2 files only, and includes no WAV or WMA support!)

We really liked the backlit display on the DMP-HD610, and this feature does put some other players to shame. It would be nice if D-Link could find a way to allow other small handheld applications to run on the DMP-HD610, i.e., perhaps a small contact list manager, since this eye-pleasing, backlit blue display could certainly be used for other things.

We think the most unique feature of the DMP-HD610 is the fact that you can connect it to any computer with a USB port and share your entire MP3 collection across your network, and then disconnect it and take it with you. We really liked this feature, and the fact that it is supported as a generic USB storage device is really an advantage.

Overall, D-Link got many things right with the Roq-it DMP-HD610. The upgradeability, display, and price are the three areas that really won us over. Yes, the iPod is sexier and looks cooler, but it costs almost twice as much as the DMP-HD610 and isn't compatible with Windows. When you look at the pluses and minuses between these two units, the DMP-HD610's positives shine through. The lack of a high speed connection really limits this unit in some ways; but, if you are an MP3 player bargain shopper and don't mind a few limitations and idiosyncrasies, then the Roq-it DMP-HD610 is a good value worth your consideration.