Suma's Neon MP3 Player: Challenging The Diamond Rio

2. The Neon In Detail

This little guy is absolutely uncomplicated and ultra-portable. The dynamic style is particularly very attractive. Also the package is non-standard, as Suma ships the player inside a cool aluminium can. You will find some ear phones, a USB cable, a webbing, a CD and a little bag inside.

The good contrasted display has three lines and can also be read at poor light proportions. The first line will show you the artist, line two names the title and below that you will see the play time. To show artist and title correctly, the Neon will need MP3 tags. If they shouldn't be available, the player will display the track (or file) name. Unfortunately, the display is limited to 30 characters. If some name is longer, the exceeding characters it will be chopped off. At the top of the display you will also find an indicator for the battery status, volume level and the track number.

Most people will be able to use the Neon player even without looking into the comprehensive manual, as all functions can be used intuitively. There is, for example, treble and bass fine tuning, random and shuffle play and the option to alter contrast.

Suma abandoned all kinds of gimmicks - that's something which helps to keep the handling easy. Too many options would complicate use of the Neon. In addition, only a few people really make use of toy-functions. The manufacturer also cut off the option to set up personal play lists. Even the software doesn't give you any option to do this.

It took about 90 seconds to fill the memory of 64 MB using the USB cable. That is approximately 700 kB/s. You can upgrade the data capacity by 16, 32 or 64 MB by using a Smart Media card. This kind of storage solution is more commonly used in digital photo cameras. At an average 4 minutes per title, the Neon will hold approximately 16 titles with 64 MB of memory.