Ezmax EZMP-4100 (2GB)

Another fresh entrant from Korea, this player is a candy bar MP3 model that bears no particularly outstanding design highlights and is dressed in somber colors of either white/grey or black/grey. So what's special about it? Well, unlike a certain flash-based player from a Singaporean-based company, the EZMP-4100 has twice the storage capacity at 2GB, which puts it at just half the size of the Cupertino miniature.

Upside: From a feature set point of view, the EZMP-4100 does not seem to lack for anything. There is line-in and voice encoding, a dual earphone jack to share your best tunes with your likewise buddy, FM tuner/encoder and even support for the obscure OGG Vorbis audio codec. From our first look, menu navigational functionalities is apparently controlled by the joystick and the player also packs in an OLED display which is now becoming standard with recent offerings from Korea. At 2GB, the EZMP-4100 represents the shrinking difference between micro harddrive players and high-capacity flash-based players in terms of storage. Compared with Aiwa's HW-2000 (1.5GB) micro harddrive player, the EZMP-4000 has a greater capacity in a smaller form factor. If priced low enough, it would definitely prove to be of greater value for the cost-conscious. Gym types will be especially appreciative of the fact that they can now squeeze more songs into a virtually skip-free device plus the fact that song transfer is less of a pain with built-in USB 2.0 connectivity.

Downside: As mentioned, we are not wowed by the uninspired design. Whether the navigational interface would prove to be easy to use will have to await fuller testing once the review unit comes in. Though there is SRS WOW for a little digital sound enhancement, it is unconfirmed whether there would be onboard equalizer controls on the unit as well.

For a 2GB thumbdrive-sized player, it would have been a nice touch if connectivity to the PC is through an onboard USB port as opposed to reliance on a separate USB cable. Big data files can then be easily transferred in a tiny small factor, a definite boon to office execs.

We noticed is that there is no separate audio management program. It is all very well and good to drag-and-drop music files through Windows Explorer for a small 256MB player, but not when you are trying to grapple with 2GB worth of music files. However, we do see that there is a possible workaround if the user craves a playlist feature since the EZMP-4100 supports in-player folder navigation. It is still possible to drag MP3s into separate folders for selected playback, but we will have to confirm this functionality once we conduct the actual review.

Outlook: We do not have much beef with the EZMP-4100 for its rich feature set as well as its hearty storage capacity. Should the player be priced even lower than Creative's N200, then this tiny David may have the chops to tackle a Goliath.