The Taiwanese firm's long-drawn compliment to the Cupertino design team has culminated in Luxpro superseding its Californian counterparts with an improved Tangent design that also includes a display. Will the new EZ Tangent prove a bigger chip off the old block or fall short of the classic original?

Design
On first looks, the EZ Tangent rather resembles the Super Tangent with an OLED display attached. Placed length-wise to increase the viewing area on the narrow unit, the screen utilizes a tri-color scheme that reminds us of the CGA displays used in early console games like Pac Man. Yet despite the aged display in an age of color screens, it is still superior to monochrome versions and viewable under direct sunlight.

	Hot, red loving. Click for larger image

The four-way control pad has been shifted lower to make way for the new display and the controls are now oriented in parallel to the screen. Otherwise, it is still the same control pad as in the Tangent we had reviewed earlier, with the same keys that, though stiff, offer good tactile feedback.

In the previous iteration of the Tangent, it had two slider switches on the back with the first controlling the different feature modes and the second operating the bass boost feature. Now with the addition of the OLED display, some of the feature controls have been migrated to the player menu instead. Though the EZ Tangent now mimics the shuffle with a single slider switch, it comes with built-in grooves to ease the frictionless dilemma we had with the iPod shuffle.

Measuring 92.5 x 26 x 11.3mm, the new Tangent is certainly larger than the old shuffle in terms of both length and girth. However, despite its size "superiority", the EZ Tangent easily makes up for it with a set of features that the shuffle lacks.

This shortcoming in the shuffle stems from the fact that Apple has chosen to work on improving its larger iPod units rather than its first flash-based model, which has seen competitors pulling ahead of the shuffle in terms of design and features.

Features
The EZ Tangent has a standard feature set of voice/FM recording and FM radio. We did miss the Super Tangent's artificial female voice, which announces the FM frequency to compensate for the missing screen.

	Perfect black chic? Click for larger image

Surprisingly, the EZ Tangent offers the user a series of adjustable settings for FM reception which we have not seen in an MP3 player for quite a long while. FM tweaking options include reception sensitivity (high; medium; low) and KHz incremental search (50; 100; 200). Theoretically, setting the sensitivity on low will speed up the search since the unit will skip over lower-powered stations. However, if you are looking for a specific radio station, which in our case was 92.4MHz, you have to either reset the sensitivity to medium or change the incremental search to 50KHz.

For users in land-locked countries with a gazillion of radio stations on the FM spectrum, the EZ Tangent's flexibility will prove to be a dealmaker But for places where selection of stations is not a headache, we would have preferred the EZ Tangent to come with an auto-scanning function and more preset stations than the current 10.

With sound equalizers, the EZ Tangent offers a large selection of 18 different ones, including obscure ones like Ska (form of Jamaican music). It is an enviable list that is no doubt aimed at suiting a variety of sonic-tweaking needs, though it is odd that a user-defined one is left out.

Performance
Though Luxpro set a conservative 8 hours of play time for the EZ Tangent, our test results was a disappointing 6 hours 15 minutes; just slightly over three times as much if we were playing video on the iPod.

Transfer speed was an average 1.86MB per second.

Sonic-wise, we detected a slight high-pitched distortion in the left channel when we tested the EZ Tangent with the Etymotic ER-4P MicroPro. Though it was only very slight and could be overridden when we increased the volume, it was still something that would still irk mobile audiophiles. We felt that mid-bass on the unit was not low enough, though things were still pretty crisp where the highs were concerned.