Panasonic SV-SD750V

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Even though warning bells have been ringing in the MP3 market with the demise of Rio and Olympus withdrawing its m:robe brand of MP3 players, Japanese electronics behemoth, Panasonic apparently sees a future in the still currently Apple-dominated domain.

Upside: Our prototype unit for the SV-SD750 came in a sleek silver finish with a classy mirrored front that's reminiscent of the Sony E-500 series. It's certainly good enough to function as an emergency mirror, and while scratches will be extremely visible a la the iPod nano, we like how the screen mysteriously materializes when the unit is switched on. Sort of like a mythical "mirror, mirror on the wall" routine.

We like the buttons on the new Panasonic. Made out of a single panel, not unlike the Motorola Razr V3, the material is a cross between plastic and a form of foamy rubber; it's has good tactile feedback and manages to be both responsive and comfortable at the same time.

The navigation isn't the half-baked affair we've seen on some other MP3 players. There's the 1.5-inch screen, plenty big since there is no video or picture viewing. Pressing the mode button will bring the user to the function menu (audio playback, FM, voice playback, voice recording). Press it again and it's the contextual settings menu for the currently active function.

Battery is removable on this fellow, and with a footprint of 36 x 29mm, it's smaller than most removable cells we've seen, including the Sony NW-HD5's 880mAh version. Panasonic claims a playback time of 45 hours with the 490mAh battery, and from our cursory drain test, it's pretty much capable of fulfilling Panasonic's promise.

The Japanese company remains one of the few manufacturers to use removable storage cards as the medium of choice, despite market gravitation towards built-in flash memory modules. That's good and bad. What's thumbs up about it would be expandability, and with dipping prices for SD cards and elevating memory sizes, large-capacity SD cards are no longer an exorbitant purchase. On the flip side, that's still added cost, and with no built-in memory, you would need to factor in the cost of an SD card, unless Panasonic decides to bundle one in.

The company has included a new music management software to go along with its player. Dubbed the SD-Jukebox, this fifth generation of the original certainly has the standard bells and whistles that come with most music management software. We especially like the Music Sommelier feature which matches similar sounding tracks together to create playlists based on mood.

For audio tweakers, the SV-SD750 has a good selection that will suit most, including Panasonic's own surround sound digital sound processing and equalizer-based bass enhancements.

Downside: Bearing in mind that this is still a prototype unit, we still ran some tests to test out its pre-retail performance.

The auto FM tuner comes with 20 presets, plenty in our location but it gets a thumbs down for missing three stations in the auto preset. We had to manually seek them out, and oddly, the "missing" stations were not due to them being weak in terms of broadcast strength.

It's unfortunate that it is not possible to drag-and-drop music files into an SD card and have it immediately playable on the SV-SD750. Possibly its to hamper piracy, but with the uber-slow transfer speed, 0.15MB per second via the SD-Jukebox, it was positively excruciating. Even deleting the files through the software took 3 minutes 46 seconds for 199MB worth of MP3s. Even when we switched to a faster Imation Ultra-High Speed SD card, the score improved only slightly to 0.31MB per second.

Oddly, we had trouble transferring tracks that had been "Music Sommelier-ed" to the unit. We had no trouble with other tracks, though.

We noticed that there is a slight 3-second delay when switching between function modes, and though the stock earphones are adequate in quality and can be fitted together for safekeeping, it will prove to be a bit big for some ears.

Outlook: Certainly one of Panasonic's best MP3 efforts so far, we can't wait for the company to iron out the glitches in this prototype for the full retail version. Check back here for a full review once its available.