Meizu Mini Player SL 8GB Media Player Review
Despite having been busted at the CeBIT show for alleged copyright infringement, Meizu makes some stylish media players that compete with a host of 2, 4 and 8GB Flash players with 2-3in screens.
The Mini SL is not a brand new design, but it has recently been given an improved screen, some new firmware and has shed a few millimetres around the waist due to the installation of a smaller, but more efficient battery.
Beyond the fact that the Mini is small and light - it measures a compact 78 x 46 x 7mm and weighs only 48g despite a sturdy aluminium chassis - two features immediately separate it from much of the herd. The first is file support: this boy handles Ogg and Flac audio alongside the more common MP3, WAV and WMA. It also supports AVI and Xvid video files.The second feature is the control interface. The Chinese gadget maker clearly felt the need to sit down and re-invent the wheel on this one. You navigate around the player’s UI using an oddly-shaped pad to the left of the screen that’s both pressure- and touch-sensitive.
The majority of functions are managed by finger drags either vertically or horizontally across the pad, and since there is no ‘action’ key as such, settings are confirmed by swiping out of the menu or screen in question once they have been selected. It’s not exactly what we’d call intuitive. Using the small touchpad with the right degree of delicacy does take some practice and is not for those with unsteady hands or the DTs.
On the plus side there are some nice touches like always being able to tap the ‘M’ logo at top to take you back to the ‘now playing’ and main menu screens, which then alternate with each further tap. The system also scrolls through lists at a fair old pace, making navigating long ones quite easy.
When it comes to sound quality the Mini isn’t going to keep the engineers at Samsung or Sony awake at night, but by fiddling with the plethora of EQ and effects settings we always managed to come up with something agreeable. The “Spatializer” and associated 3D sound settings do a spectacular, if rather artificial job of opening up the soundscape.
We did a quick back-to-back test with a 30GB iPod Classic and our usual Sennheiser earphones and found that the iPod always sounded the more composed and focused of the two, though not by a particularly large margin. The Meizu could pump out a fair bit more volume than the iPod, but things tended to get a bit raucous when it did.
The Mini’s screen is a 2.41in, 260,000-colour affair with a resolution of 320 x 240. Meizu describes it as being “large and vibrant”, and while we will agree with the vibrant bit, we’re not sure who else would call 2.41 inches large. The Mini’s screen is nevertheless a fair bit bigger and brighter than that on the iPod Nano and even a wee bit bigger than the Sony Walkman A82’s screen, but that’s an altogether larger and more costly bit of kit.
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