4. Using The MP3 Player

As an MP3 player, the Neuros unit works well. However, once again, it seems to assume that anyone who buys it is not easily intimidated by technology. The "jog key" navigation is fairly easy to figure out after a bit of fiddling around, as are the buttons for playing songs and skipping forward and backward through the list. Their ease of use, however, is really proportional to how adventurous one is in digging around through menus. Hand it to someone who is unfamiliar with pushing buttons just to "see what happens" (as I did) and you realize that maybe having an "on" button that says "on" instead of requiring the user to push and hold in the "Play/Pause" button might be a good idea. It also might be a good idea for the "Play/Pause" button to say "Play/Pause," for that matter. I realize that, if you read the manual, all of these functions are easy enough to figure out, but most tech-toy vendors should know that being able to perform basic functions without instructions is a real plus for many people. That said, once I got the hang of moving through the menus, I had no problem listening to tunes.

One of the coolest features of the basic MP3 player/software functions is that the player itself contains a list of all of the songs on your computer, which it finds each time you synchronize it. Using this feature, you can create a new mix of songs while you are away from your computer. The next time you synchronize the player with the Sync Manager software, the new song list is imported onto the player. This is pretty handy because you can create a new list of music you want to hear whenever you have a spare minute and without access to your computer. When you get to your computer, you can hook up the player, synchronize, and be out the door with a new batch of songs in a matter of minutes.