It seems like the hottest trend among portable electronics these days is to get rid of physical buttons and replace them with touch sensitive controls. The Apple iPod may have that popular click wheel, but Super Talent is taking the touch sensitive route with their latest offering, the Super Talent VIDEGO24. It’s got a fairly large 2.4-inch color screen, 1GB of internal memory, and a microSD expansion slot for more storage. The features sound reasonable, but there are more than a couple of issues with the user interface and physical design.
Core Features and Specifications
The ultra portable Super Talent VIDEGO24 is probably one of the most pocketable players available on the market. It has a fairly small footprint, but it’s the super-slim 9mm thick profile that’ll wow you. It really does feel like you have a slightly thicker credit card.
In addition to MP3 and WMA music files, this gadget also comes equipped with FM radio, voice recorder, video playback, e-book support, and a picture viewer. That’s a lot of features to pack into such a slim package. As mentioned above, there is one gigabyte of internal memory. This isn’t much, especially if you want to make use of the movie player, but thankfully you can expand that storage through the microSD slot.
Unfortunately, microSD cards currently max out at two gigabytes. There are microSDHC cards, but I’m thinking it’s safe to assume that the VIDEGO24 is not compatible with the newer format. Hopefully this can be clarified in the specifications for the future as we found no reference to the microSDHC format. In this way, you are fundamentally restricted to a maximum capacity of 3GB, assuming you don’t want to keep swapping memory cards.
Interestingly, the player is typically not held in “portrait” mode like most other MP3 players. You hold it sideways so that the display is always in landscape and the controls to the right are also oriented this way. The two main controls — menu and pause/play — are located in the center. At the top are back and forward, whereas volume control is on the bottom. At the very top of the player is a switch for choosing between off, on, and hold, and next to that is the only physical button for A-B mode. This is also the button you hold to turn the player on in the first place.
Music, Video, and Picture Playback
There’s actually quite a bit of functionality in this tiny little player. The sound quality from the music player is fairly decent and it comes with several pre-set equalizer settings: normal, classic, jazz, pop, and rock. You can also customize this setting through a graphic equalizer. I would highly recommend against pumping the bass or treble too high, however, as it starts to sound pretty harsh. I stick with normal, even if it is on the flat side of things.
The resolution on the display isn’t the greatest and the frame rate is quite poor. The Super Talent VIDEGO24 does do video, but it’s not the best for that. It is better than previous Super Talent offerings that I’ve had experience with so I commend the company in that respect. The picture viewer is pretty much what you’d expect: adequate but not fantastic.
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User Interface
Man alive is the user interface confusing! People say that Apple owns more than three-quarters of the portable music market. By and large, it’s because the iPod is reasonably intuitive and the click wheel makes navigation a breeze, despite the fact that it is hideously underfeatured. Despite the hefty feature set, it doesn’t matter if people can’t figure out how to use it easily.
The main menu is simple enough — you press forward or back to go through the different features — but as soon as you’re within a function, like the music player, things get a little convoluted. For starters, I couldn’t immediately figure out how to set the play mode to random. I also couldn’t find the equalizer settings right away either. The truth is that it’s a single button press, per se, to access these features. Instead, you must hold the play button. Who would have thought that?
What’s more, when you hold the play button to bring up the settings menu, go into play mode to choose random, and then press “M” (menu/cancel) to get back to the main screen, something strange happens. The forward and back buttons now go through the different play modes rather than change the track. This is because when you bring up the settings menu, you actually have to go down and choose “cancel”. Weird. So weird. Hopefully with some software tweaks, the madness can stop.
A very big issue with the physical design of this player is the power slider. As mentioned earlier, this switches between off, on, and hold, in that order. The switch doesn’t really click in place very well, so it’s very easy to accidentally go from hold to off when all you wanted to do was go from hold to on. Given that the A-B button is used to turn the player on in the first place, the slider should be just for hold and, uh, not hold.
Building Database…
Two things annoy me very much about this MP3 player. First, every time that you turn it on, it goes through a process where it needs to check the disk and build the database. This process is several seconds long and gets very irritating when all you want to do is enjoy your music. Because of the issues with the off/on/hold slider switch as well, you can see how it can get even more frustrating if you accidentally turn the player off. Turn it back on and you have to suffer through the database building all over again.
Second, there doesn’t appear to be any memory effect to this player at all. By this I mean that it doesn’t seem to “remember” what was the last track that you were playing before you turned it off. It also doesn’t remember the play mode or the equalizer you chose. What’s more, the volume is always at its maximum when you turn the VIDEGO24 on. Very frustrating, very annoying.
Another gripe, which isn’t quite as major, is that there appears to be no recognition for a folder structure or pre-made playlists. Instead, all of your MP3 and WMA files are clumped into one giant folder. Assuming that each music file is about 4MB, this could mean that you may scroll through 250 songs before you find the track of your choice.
These are small, simple things that can easily be corrected in the firmware. At the same time, they’re so frustrating that I actually get upset every time I use the Super Talent VIDEGO24. Frustrated users certainly aren’t happy users.
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Conclusion
Compared to previous efforts, the Super Talent VIDEGO24 is a vast improvement in the right direction. The screen is much richer and more detailed, and the sound quality is much improved. I’m usually not a huge fan of touch sensitive controls, but it does provide for a more upscale feel compared to the cheap buttons Super Talent once used. It actually reminds me of the keypad used on LG’s Chocolate phones.
That said, this player has far too many shortcomings for me to recommend it. I enjoy the great look of the front side, but the matte black back looks cheap. The menu interface is very strange and the power switch is poorly designed. The “building database” screen makes me cringe in frustration every time I see it. Despite the robust feature set, the execution is definitely something to be desired.
Super Talent has taken steps in the right direction, but they’ve still got a lot of work to do. I’m curious if the touchscreen-equipped VIDEGO28 is any better than this. Hopefully, someone at Super Talent is already tweaking away at the firmware.
Pros
- Remarkably thin and compact
- Improved screen and sound quality
- Plenty of functions
- Touch sensitive controls look good
- microSD memory expansion
Cons
- “Building database” screen is very annoying
- Too easy to accidentally turn off when exiting hold mode
- Menu interface is very confusing
- No folder recognition, one giant playlist
- No memory effect
Overall Rating: 6.5 /10.0
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