Today, I was given a new mp3 player made by a company right here in Florida, called Augen. This device is called the Eclipse, and it is rather much a simple, cheap ho-hum Chinese-build player with Chinese-coded firmware.
This is an cheap Chinese knock-off of the iPod Nano with a video camera, circa 2009.
The first thing I did when I first got the Eclipse is tried out it’s FM radio. After a few minutes figuring out the controls, I managed to get it to work. The control set is rather annoying, and leave a lot to be desired, and can be at times be difficult to use.
As for the FM radio, it’s piss-poor. I was only able to pick up 4 stations which I could understand the sound being broadcast, and only one station out of all those being broadcast in my area was even coming in clear as day. I get better reception with a cheap 50¢ micro FM radio.
The device does support displaying text files stored in it’s memory, but the feature is an utter joke. It does not understand newlines, nor does it know how to intelligently wrap text. Also, the text display is a monospaced, bitmap font that is very similar to the classic Courier font. Worse yet, it only has a text display that is 15 characters wide. If you are imagining this in your head, this must look rather hideous.
The Eclipse has the capability of playing back your common audio formats, such as Windows WAVE format, ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio (commonly known as MP3) and Windows Media Audio.
But what’s this? Look closer at this icon.
No, you’re not misreading that, that plainly does say “OGG”. In the cheapest and utter shittiest of mp3 players, the Augen Eclipse boasts support for the patent-free Ogg Vorbis format.
For video, this device supports the wholly shitty AMV video format. AMV is a cheap and overly simple audio/video format, designed to be decoded by firmware for S1 MP3 players, which are powered by an 8-bit Zilog Z80-compatible processor.
AMV is basically 12 or 16 FPS Motion JPEG video with a fixed quantitizer and a crappy IMA ADPCM variant for audio.
Well, that it. If you want to find more information on this device, I can’t help you. The company that makes this thing doesn’t even have an email address.
My rating: 4.1 / 10 (and 2.5 of that is purely because it supports Ogg Vorbis)
6 comments:
cain't argue with ya on most of this, I got one just so I could take some of my inhouse music in the truck with me while using an iTrip to play through the factory stereo. used over 55% of the available storage with less than 100 songs, guess I need to rip at a shittier rate to get all the advertised "1000 songs" on here. really just biding time till I get the IPOD
Not much in the way of audio quality either, and you are right on with how the menu functions and controls are all screwy. Can't wait to get a better unit, but then what do I expect for 20 bucks, hell you can't get a good blow job for that!!!
at least u only spent 20$ for the stupid thing! i got mine as a gift and the person that bought it spent 80$ plus shipping out of some stuid catolog! and i'm still trying to figure out how to put friggin text on it!
My friend just found hers again...the thing doesnt want to turn on!!! -_-"
Please, give up on the text now. It's only usable for text files in Chinese, due to the crappy way it wraps text. It does not understand newlines (where you hit ENTER in the file). It does not understand word-wrap, which means if your word goes to the end of the screen, it just breaks the word right in the middle and puts the res
t on the next li
ne. It's really
annoying that it
does that. Also
, if you don't t
ake care to form
at your text pro
perly, this is w
hat happens.
It's probably deep dead. Leave it on a charger (or connected to a PC) with the power switch turned ON (because the device will not charge nor turn on if it is switched to OFF) and let it sit for 24 hours.
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