Product Review: Super Talent Vidego28 MP4 Player

I recently got my hands on the Vidego28—a 4GB touch screen MP4 player. It’s priced at just about $70, and 4GB at that price with touch screen technology makes this product practically fly off the shelves at eWiz. Demand for this thing has been so high in the past couple months and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. So I snuck into inventory and pilfered one to review. Here’s what I found:

+Design & Build: It feels like a good strong product and it’s much smaller than I thought it would be. It’s about 3.5” tall, 2” wide, and about 0.5” thick. It’s a really good size actually, perfect for pockets and stuff and much smaller and more portable than the Apple Touch. The build is really sturdy—it feels like if I dropped it, it would be fine so that’s nice. There’s three dedicated buttons on the bottom, 2 to control volume, and one to go back to the Menu screen. The touch screen is a tiny bit less than 2.5” by 1.8”. And it’s pretty light. Not too light to the point where it feels cheap, but light enough not to weigh your pants down. I was really impressed with this build as it feels much more expensive than it really is.

-User-Friendliness: This thing is only slightly user friendly. It’s easy to start up, and the menu screen is easy enough to navigate through, but figuring out where to find your files, manage your files, and delete your files are all slightly difficult tasks to figure out. I read through the instruction manual, but it isn’t helpful at all, quite frankly. It takes time to figure out where the device is storing all your recordings—it takes time to understand the logic to this thing. When the menu first pops up, it looks extremely similar to the iPhone’s Menu screen. Apart from the menu screen, all other screens are incredibly poorly constructed and cheap looking. Deleting things took forever to figure out. When you figure out how to select an item to delete, a “Delete?” screen pops up, you have to touch the up and down arrows to highlight Yes or No, instead of just being able to touch Yes or No. And the instruction booklet does not tell you this, among other things. I made a bookmark in my e-book, and I never figured out how to delete it. So, this thing takes some getting used to. Definitely not as intuitive as I wanted it to be.

+Price: Slightly above $70. This has got the be the biggest plus about this device. Even if it didn’t have touch screen technology, a 4GB MP4 player, with music, video, radio, ebook, radio & voice recorder, can store photos, and has Tetris is an amazing deal. You’d be hard pressed to find a regular MP4 player, without those features and without touch screen technology for the same price.

-Touch Screen: Not as cool as you were expecting. It’s semi-responsive, meaning it felt me about 80% of the time. I found myself poking at it over and over, however, because loading time on this player is incredibly slow sometimes. It takes up to a good 2 seconds AFTER touching the screen before the player responds. When deleting items, it can take up to 5-7 seconds to actually get this thing to delete a file. And 4 seconds to load a photo. I must admit, I found myself incredibly frustrated after playing with this thing for awhile because sometimes the touch screen wouldn’t feel me, or it would take a long time to respond, or both. It is a touch screen and they do equip you with a Stylus, but it doesn’t help much. It’s responsive to your finger just as much as the Stylus. The slow response and the fact that it tends to lock up when you delete things kinda got on my nerves though. Once you get the hang of it, however, the player becomes a lot more fun. It just takes awhile to adjust to the time it takes to process your commands.

+Speakers: The speakers on this thing are actually quite good. You have the option of using earphones, included with the player, or playing music out loud with the built in speakers. I really liked this part about the MP4 player, because it’s a portable player that can play music pretty loudly. The speakers sounded really great, I give this thing 5 stars in terms of sound quality. The only downside I see in terms of sound quality and speaker quality is that it has FM/AM radio on it, but you can’t get very good reception on it unless you have the earphones in. Then reception is acceptable. So don’t expect to be able to play the radio loud and clear on this thing. It plays MP3’s exceptionally though.

+Video: The screen has 320x240 pixels. In my opinion, the screen quality is great for the price. It runs videos smoothly. The only con is that the sample video already on the player is not synced with the music it plays. The sample video on the player is a Jessica Simpson/Nick Lachey music video, and the music slightly lags behind the video. That’s just the sample video though. The frame rates are good and the video is clear.

-Performance & Operating System: When you maneuver your way through the system, you become starkly aware that this thing is made in China. First of all, the default radio settings are in China, the welcome and goodbye screen feel pretty…uncool, there are grammer/spelling errors here and there, the sample songs and videos are all from the 70s, 80s, and 90s (nothing before 1998, LoL). Many things endemic of a bad localization program. It’ll tell you that it’s, “Deleteing” your file, when you want to trash something. What is super cool about it is that it comes with 2 songs already on the player, “Yesterday Once More” by Joni Mitchell and “Hotel California” by the Eagles. Jams, to be sure, albeit extremely dated jams. My parents would love this thing. Anyway, when you play those two songs, the song lyrics pop up, as the song plays. It’s like a mini-kareoke machine. The lyrics have also been pre-loaded onto the player, in the e-book section where you can upload text. The lyrics run along with the song, but apparently they didn’t put any breaks in the line of text, so when the lyrics are too long and it breaks into 2 lines, the letters just completely drop to the 2^nd line. For example:

You also can't skip around in a song. You can only skip the entire song, or replay the entire song. All in all, the operating system shows some pretty FOB signs, but it works. Another thing is that when you play any media, music or video, you press the Pause button. And then the media starts to play, the Pause button becomes the Play button, so if you want to pause the media, you have to press Play. Confused? I was too. Basically, they just got the buttons backwards, normally, you’d press the play button and while the media plays, the play button becomes a pause button. Again, all endemic of some pretty bad localization skills on the part of Super Talent.

+Features: Music, video, displays photos, fm/am radio, built-in speakers, e-book (basically you can upload txt files onto the player as well), Tetris, voice recording & radio recording. The radio recoding is pretty interesting. Reminds me of my middle school days when I used to record music off the radio. All what you pretty much expect.

+Battery Life: Battery life actually pretty good. I played with it for a total of 4 hours and only half of the battery was gone. A+ in terms of battery life

+Input/Output Ports: It’s got an input port for headphones, a slot for a mini SD card, which isn’t included (you can put a max of 4GB on this thing), and a USB slot. It connects to your computer via USB.

-Accessories: The box comes with a charger, USB cable, earphones, stylus, cleathing cloth, a velvet pouch that looks like it should belong to a fairy or wizard, installation CD, and a user manual, which you might as well throw away. A big con is that there isn’t anywhere to put your stylus. Unless of course you carry this thing around in your fairy velvet pouch. Seriously. It doesn’t attach to the player at all. You’d just have to carry it around separately.

PROS: The Price. A little over $70 for a 4GB media player. The build. It looks cool, it’s sturdy, the design looks like a dumbed-down version of the Apple touch. It’s highly portable because of that. Menu screen also looks awesome. I love the speakers and the fact that it can play music pretty loud without the earphones. The video quality was also pretty good, relative to the price, battery life was outstanding, and it comes with plenty of features.

CONS: All the things that make this feel really cheap: Bad localization (grammer issues, typos). I’m a stickler for those kind of things. The touch screen is not too responsive. It has a pretty slow response time, and sometimes it doesn’t feel me. I felt super frustrated a couple of times. Another con is the fact that it’s only kind of user-friendly. You can get around, but figuring out how to manage your files is a pain, and the user manual is not helpful at all. Lastly, it sucks that I can’t put the stylus anywhere except my velvet wizard pouch.

Conclusion: If you want a cheap 4GB MP4 player, this is it. It’s definitely no iTouch, though it does have a pretty good build and the menu screen looks like something from Apple. I wouldn’t get this thing if you’re thinking you’re going to get an awesomely responsive touch screen, because it’s not. Still, for the price, this is a pretty good deal. It would make an amazing present for someone looking for an MP4 player. It feels like a child’s version of the Apple Touch, actually. For me, personally, I think I’d stick with a 4GB MP4 player that isn’t touch screen, if I can find one, just because I’m too impatient and the response time on this would make me lose it. But if you want an entry level mp4 with touch screen capabilities, I don’t think there’s another one out there like this with a price as low as this one’s.