The last review of a Chinese product that I did was the Teclast M50HD MP4 player. But that was not mine and borrowed from a friend. Now, finally I bought a MP4 player (hereafter referred to as PMP) for myself and this is not from Teclast but another company Ainol.
Reviewer's Note: All pics are 800 X 600 and hosted on TE server. You can click on them to get a larger image. All pics have been clicked by me except for one.
The Box
The box of this PMP is a small one with not much styling but only a few bare essential things written on it. You can see in the second picture that it has a dot on the 16GB mark which means the player is of 16GB capacity.
Front of the Box
Back of the Box
What’s Inside the Box ??
The box has the following things housed inside
1. The PMP itself. (Mine was Black)
2. White earphones (Ainol branded)
3. USB Cable
4. Remote control
5. Manual
6. Warranty Card
Accessories I bought separately
1. TV Out cable
2. Audio Cable
3. Soft Case / Cover
4. OTG Cable
[BREAK=Accessories Info and Specifications]
Few words on Accessories
The stock earphones are actually sounding good and even feel good to hold, not like those cheap ones. The remote control is a very useful accessory. The manual is completely in Chinese and hence redundant. It is sort of a norm that none of the Chinese PMPs (any brand) carry the TV Out and audio cable and the charger as a part of standard package. The USB cable can be used to charge the player using a computer or connecting to a USB based wall charger.
PMP Specifications
Here are the detailed specs of the player.
Screen size – 4.3â€
Screen Resolution – 800 x 480 (16:9)
Playtime – Audio 12 Hrs, Video – 6Hrs
Capacity – 16GB (actual usable 14.87 GB)
Video Formats – AVI, RM , RMVB, FLV, WMV, MOV, VOB, MPEG, DAT, MP4, 3GP, ASF, MKV (limited support)
Audio Formats – MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC, WAV, AAC, DTS, AC3
Image Formats - JPEG, BMP, GIF
Lyric show
TV OUT – Connect the player to TV to watch movies or pictures
FM Radio Receiver
FM Transmitter
Record (Mic)
TF Card Slot – max 32GB card supported
Dual Onboard speaker
Ebook – Text File reader
Supportable OS: Win 2000/XP/Vista/OSX
Interface: USB: USB 2.0 High Speed
Headphones: 3.5mm headphone output
Phew…too long a list
[BREAK=Few Pics]
Pic taken from amazon.com
Top of the player
On the right side is the up / down button and ENTER button
On the left side is the STOP/OFF, ESC/BACK/REWIND and FORWARD buttons
Bottom of the player
Here on left you see the ON/OFF switch and on right side is the Infrared receiver for remote. I would say the placement cannot be more apt.
Back of the Player
The name of this player is after one of the Transformer's character - Alphatrion.
Right side
Here you see the Volume Keys, TV Out and Headphone out, Mic and in the center is one of the speakers
Left Side
On left side is the DC IN and USB connector and on right is the MicroSD Card holder. In the center is the other speaker.
Stand By
This can be said as standby screen. The navigation is exactly like PSP
PS: I have deliberately put the background of the player as black (i created a 800 x 480 wallpaper using mspaint) to ensure that the navigation and icons are easily visible.
[BREAK=Audio]
Audio
This PMP can play the standard MP3, WMA, AAC files along with lossless audio formats like FLAC and APE. The player itself can update the media by finding the songs on the disk and can segregate them in albums, artists, year, genre etc categories. This is obviously if the ID3 information is filled in properly. The audio quality is clear and you also have options of preset equalizers like Jazz, classical, soft, rock etc.
There is no option of Bass which I feel should have been there. The sound from stock earphones is actually very good and when I plugged in my RE2 the audio quality was fantastic. I actually did not expect that.
When the song is being played it shows the artist, song and format of the song. There is no provision to display album art. There is also an equalizer type visualization.
The volume setting of the player is loud enough and we need not go to the highest level. The sequence of play can be random or in order.
[BREAK=Videos]
Videos
This is the main reason we buy a good PMP right ? It supports a lot of video formats as mentioned in the specs and even supports H264 encoded video formats. SRT format subtitles along with IDX/SUB where we can have multiple subs for same movie are also supported. It also remembers where you left off and hence asks when we play that video again.
The videos look really good on that 4.3†screen primarily because of the screen resolution which is 800 x 480
By default the video will come as per the last set settings, we can however change it to either full screen occupying the entire real estate of the screen, or the 16:9 format with black bars on top and bottom and one more option of original size in which only a fraction of screen is occupied which is expected as for example if I have a 640 x 272 resolution video and since the screen resolution is 800 x 480 and movie is not scaled then it will be displayed in a box on screen.
The fast forward and rewind options work great and the speed is also very good. Pressing the M button remote brings the onscreen options which consists of
Zooming
File Information
The video formats that I was successfully able to play flawlessly on this are
AVI, WMV, 3GP, FLV, MOV, VOB, DAT, MP4 and RMVB
Now you see I have not mentioned MKV in the above list. But the truth is that this player supports MKV files encoded in H264 with DTS/AC3 audio also. But the support is limited and the player manual itself does not advocate MKV format playing so we should not be complaining.
I tried a Hindi video song encoded at lower bitrate and that worked flawlessly with few frame drops. But then I put a sample of Transformer having bitrate of more than 7 Mbps and the player was able to open it and display the video perfectly but the frame rate was very low and the audio was totally out of sync. It is only RMVB format 720p videos with even more than 10 Mbps bitrate that plays perfectly fine. I am not sure why but all these Chinese PMPs give a lot of stress to RMVB format which I feel is very less prominent.
But overall the support of video formats is fantastic and there is absolutely no need of converting videos at all. Even the 3GP videos look completely watchable on this screen.
But one thing to notice is that the screen resolution is 800 x 480 but even 720p videos can be played which will look fantastic on the screen but even better on TV.
[BREAK=Few Video Pics]
Above is a MKV file being played on the player and below its specs
Subtitles also come fine
[BREAK=TV Out]
TV Out
This is the most interesting feature of this player and personally I like it the most. This feature allows you to enjoy those videos on a TV. The various options available for TV Out are
Composite
SD Interlace
SD Progressive
HD Component
For me only the composite works with my TV as expected. In the last review I had mentioned that I had problems with audio coming out of TV and rather it was coming only from player. That was because of my noobiness :ashamed:
Actually there is another audio cable that need to be connected to audio jack of the player and other end to TV audio.
The video quality on TV is really very good and it really makes the movie watching experience enjoyable.
Here are some screenies of TV Out
The navigation can now done on the screen
Black Bars
Zoomed In..so no Black Bars
With Subtitles
Wall - E
The best part is that entire player can be operated on TV rather than only few functions (vis a vis M50HD where only video and photos came on TV).
[BREAK=Picture Viewer]
Picture Viewer
The picture viewer in this is plain jane. The one thing that I do not like is we do not get any matrix display where all pics are visible and we can select which to see. Instead like PSP one after another are available as below
Picture Information
We can set any of the pictures as wallpaper also.
But one thing to note is that there seems to be no option to rotate the pics. Slideshow is also there. We can decide how the transition happens from one pic to another like zoom in, letterbox effect, slide out etc etc. Just some fancy thing.
PS: I have deliberately set the background pic as complete black to ensure that menu items and navigation are clearly visible.
[BREAK=FM Receiver and Transmitter]
FM Receiver (Radio) and Transmitter
Radio Receiver (FM Radio)
This is the usual radio and we have an option of setting the radio region to either Japan or China/Europe/US. The earphones need to be plugged in to catch the radio stations. It even works without earphones but in most of the stations we can hear only static and in some there is distinct audio but nevertheless it is useless, better put the earphones and enjoy the radio. 20 Presets are allowed which is good.
FM Transmitter
This PMP features an FM transmitter which means that we can transmit audio from this PMP to a radio receiver. I was able to transmit the MP3 music I was listening. I set the transmit frequency as 90 Mhz and then tuned radio in my phone to this frequency and the music was clearly audible. So person A can listen to music on PMP while the same can be heard by another one by tuning to that set frequency. I am not sure about the range of this transmission. I have not tested the range yet.
[BREAK=Ebook Reader]
E-Book Reader
The ebook is another super feature of this PMP. You just have to put a text file and you can read it. The percentage of book that you are at is also displayed.You also have options to
Add and delete bookmarks
Set the font as small, large, medium
Color of the font
Switch mode – transition from one page to another should be normal or sliding.
Rotate – This means you can view the text file horizontally or vertically. This is really cool.
Here are some of the pics (TE Guidelines)
Options
Horizontal Orientation
Vertical Orientation
[BREAK=Mic, Recording and Games]
Mic and Recording
There is a Mic on board and we can record audio from that in Good, Normal and Bad quality.
Unfortunately there is no facility to record from radio. I hope they include this in future firmware releases.
Games
Yup there are games too. Three games are bundled – Chess (not the usual), Russian Block (Tetris) and one more. It is just a fancy add on. There is facility to add new games but how and what format I don’t know.
Tetris
[BREAK=Battery]
Battery Life
I am yet to watch a movie at a stretch on this player so I cannot comment on its battery life with that. The company claimed is 6 Hrs for video and 12 Hrs for audio. The newer firmware seems to have improved the battery life (as per its website).
Here is a picture of how the screen where battery information is available. I don’t know what that graph is. :S
One very good thing is that when we are watching any movie at that time only we have a shortcut to see battery information (in percentage) which is extremely helpful.
The battery life when watching movie on TV is great (as the LCD screen is not in operation). I watched a movie yesterday (on TV) when the battery was like 88% and after 2.5 Hrs the battery was still at 66% which is excellent IMO.
[BREAK=Player Information and Final Points]
Firmware and Other Information
Final points
I bought this player after deciding on first my budget and then on the features. I am happy that I was able to get this thing at right price. As of now I feel this player is really VFM. I hope they improve the MKV support and ability to play higher bitrate MKV files. The PMP is also light in weight.
I have not mentioned about the OTG functionality here wherein you can connect a USB drive (pen drive) directly to the player because in my case I was not able to make it work or probably I was doing something wrong. Will update later on that front.
Damages: This PMP cost me 500 RMB (approx 3500 Rupees) for only the player and I payed 80 RMB (approx 560 Rupees) for the Case, video and audio cable, screen guard and OTG Cable.
Where to buy ??
This player is mainly available (in stores) in China only I suppose. But I have seen on amazon.com and even on ebay (US and some other country ebay sites). MP4Nation.net does not carry this player.
Thanks. Comments are welcome
Reviewer's Note: All pics are 800 X 600 and hosted on TE server. You can click on them to get a larger image. All pics have been clicked by me except for one.
The Box
The box of this PMP is a small one with not much styling but only a few bare essential things written on it. You can see in the second picture that it has a dot on the 16GB mark which means the player is of 16GB capacity.
Front of the Box
Back of the Box
What’s Inside the Box ??
The box has the following things housed inside
1. The PMP itself. (Mine was Black)
2. White earphones (Ainol branded)
3. USB Cable
4. Remote control
5. Manual
6. Warranty Card
Accessories I bought separately
1. TV Out cable
2. Audio Cable
3. Soft Case / Cover
4. OTG Cable
[BREAK=Accessories Info and Specifications]
Few words on Accessories
The stock earphones are actually sounding good and even feel good to hold, not like those cheap ones. The remote control is a very useful accessory. The manual is completely in Chinese and hence redundant. It is sort of a norm that none of the Chinese PMPs (any brand) carry the TV Out and audio cable and the charger as a part of standard package. The USB cable can be used to charge the player using a computer or connecting to a USB based wall charger.
PMP Specifications
Here are the detailed specs of the player.
Screen size – 4.3â€
Screen Resolution – 800 x 480 (16:9)
Playtime – Audio 12 Hrs, Video – 6Hrs
Capacity – 16GB (actual usable 14.87 GB)
Video Formats – AVI, RM , RMVB, FLV, WMV, MOV, VOB, MPEG, DAT, MP4, 3GP, ASF, MKV (limited support)
Audio Formats – MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC, WAV, AAC, DTS, AC3
Image Formats - JPEG, BMP, GIF
Lyric show
TV OUT – Connect the player to TV to watch movies or pictures
FM Radio Receiver
FM Transmitter
Record (Mic)
TF Card Slot – max 32GB card supported
Dual Onboard speaker
Ebook – Text File reader
Supportable OS: Win 2000/XP/Vista/OSX
Interface: USB: USB 2.0 High Speed
Headphones: 3.5mm headphone output
Phew…too long a list
[BREAK=Few Pics]
Pic taken from amazon.com
Top of the player
On the right side is the up / down button and ENTER button
On the left side is the STOP/OFF, ESC/BACK/REWIND and FORWARD buttons
Bottom of the player
Here on left you see the ON/OFF switch and on right side is the Infrared receiver for remote. I would say the placement cannot be more apt.
Back of the Player
The name of this player is after one of the Transformer's character - Alphatrion.
Right side
Here you see the Volume Keys, TV Out and Headphone out, Mic and in the center is one of the speakers
Left Side
On left side is the DC IN and USB connector and on right is the MicroSD Card holder. In the center is the other speaker.
Stand By
This can be said as standby screen. The navigation is exactly like PSP
PS: I have deliberately put the background of the player as black (i created a 800 x 480 wallpaper using mspaint) to ensure that the navigation and icons are easily visible.
[BREAK=Audio]
Audio
This PMP can play the standard MP3, WMA, AAC files along with lossless audio formats like FLAC and APE. The player itself can update the media by finding the songs on the disk and can segregate them in albums, artists, year, genre etc categories. This is obviously if the ID3 information is filled in properly. The audio quality is clear and you also have options of preset equalizers like Jazz, classical, soft, rock etc.
There is no option of Bass which I feel should have been there. The sound from stock earphones is actually very good and when I plugged in my RE2 the audio quality was fantastic. I actually did not expect that.
When the song is being played it shows the artist, song and format of the song. There is no provision to display album art. There is also an equalizer type visualization.
The volume setting of the player is loud enough and we need not go to the highest level. The sequence of play can be random or in order.
[BREAK=Videos]
Videos
This is the main reason we buy a good PMP right ? It supports a lot of video formats as mentioned in the specs and even supports H264 encoded video formats. SRT format subtitles along with IDX/SUB where we can have multiple subs for same movie are also supported. It also remembers where you left off and hence asks when we play that video again.
The videos look really good on that 4.3†screen primarily because of the screen resolution which is 800 x 480
By default the video will come as per the last set settings, we can however change it to either full screen occupying the entire real estate of the screen, or the 16:9 format with black bars on top and bottom and one more option of original size in which only a fraction of screen is occupied which is expected as for example if I have a 640 x 272 resolution video and since the screen resolution is 800 x 480 and movie is not scaled then it will be displayed in a box on screen.
The fast forward and rewind options work great and the speed is also very good. Pressing the M button remote brings the onscreen options which consists of
Zooming
File Information
The video formats that I was successfully able to play flawlessly on this are
AVI, WMV, 3GP, FLV, MOV, VOB, DAT, MP4 and RMVB
Now you see I have not mentioned MKV in the above list. But the truth is that this player supports MKV files encoded in H264 with DTS/AC3 audio also. But the support is limited and the player manual itself does not advocate MKV format playing so we should not be complaining.
I tried a Hindi video song encoded at lower bitrate and that worked flawlessly with few frame drops. But then I put a sample of Transformer having bitrate of more than 7 Mbps and the player was able to open it and display the video perfectly but the frame rate was very low and the audio was totally out of sync. It is only RMVB format 720p videos with even more than 10 Mbps bitrate that plays perfectly fine. I am not sure why but all these Chinese PMPs give a lot of stress to RMVB format which I feel is very less prominent.
But overall the support of video formats is fantastic and there is absolutely no need of converting videos at all. Even the 3GP videos look completely watchable on this screen.
But one thing to notice is that the screen resolution is 800 x 480 but even 720p videos can be played which will look fantastic on the screen but even better on TV.
[BREAK=Few Video Pics]
Above is a MKV file being played on the player and below its specs
Subtitles also come fine
[BREAK=TV Out]
TV Out
This is the most interesting feature of this player and personally I like it the most. This feature allows you to enjoy those videos on a TV. The various options available for TV Out are
Composite
SD Interlace
SD Progressive
HD Component
For me only the composite works with my TV as expected. In the last review I had mentioned that I had problems with audio coming out of TV and rather it was coming only from player. That was because of my noobiness :ashamed:
Actually there is another audio cable that need to be connected to audio jack of the player and other end to TV audio.
The video quality on TV is really very good and it really makes the movie watching experience enjoyable.
Here are some screenies of TV Out
The navigation can now done on the screen
Black Bars
Zoomed In..so no Black Bars
With Subtitles
Wall - E
The best part is that entire player can be operated on TV rather than only few functions (vis a vis M50HD where only video and photos came on TV).
[BREAK=Picture Viewer]
Picture Viewer
The picture viewer in this is plain jane. The one thing that I do not like is we do not get any matrix display where all pics are visible and we can select which to see. Instead like PSP one after another are available as below
Picture Information
We can set any of the pictures as wallpaper also.
But one thing to note is that there seems to be no option to rotate the pics. Slideshow is also there. We can decide how the transition happens from one pic to another like zoom in, letterbox effect, slide out etc etc. Just some fancy thing.
PS: I have deliberately set the background pic as complete black to ensure that menu items and navigation are clearly visible.
[BREAK=FM Receiver and Transmitter]
FM Receiver (Radio) and Transmitter
Radio Receiver (FM Radio)
This is the usual radio and we have an option of setting the radio region to either Japan or China/Europe/US. The earphones need to be plugged in to catch the radio stations. It even works without earphones but in most of the stations we can hear only static and in some there is distinct audio but nevertheless it is useless, better put the earphones and enjoy the radio. 20 Presets are allowed which is good.
FM Transmitter
This PMP features an FM transmitter which means that we can transmit audio from this PMP to a radio receiver. I was able to transmit the MP3 music I was listening. I set the transmit frequency as 90 Mhz and then tuned radio in my phone to this frequency and the music was clearly audible. So person A can listen to music on PMP while the same can be heard by another one by tuning to that set frequency. I am not sure about the range of this transmission. I have not tested the range yet.
[BREAK=Ebook Reader]
E-Book Reader
The ebook is another super feature of this PMP. You just have to put a text file and you can read it. The percentage of book that you are at is also displayed.You also have options to
Add and delete bookmarks
Set the font as small, large, medium
Color of the font
Switch mode – transition from one page to another should be normal or sliding.
Rotate – This means you can view the text file horizontally or vertically. This is really cool.
Here are some of the pics (TE Guidelines)
Options
Horizontal Orientation
Vertical Orientation
[BREAK=Mic, Recording and Games]
Mic and Recording
There is a Mic on board and we can record audio from that in Good, Normal and Bad quality.
Unfortunately there is no facility to record from radio. I hope they include this in future firmware releases.
Games
Yup there are games too. Three games are bundled – Chess (not the usual), Russian Block (Tetris) and one more. It is just a fancy add on. There is facility to add new games but how and what format I don’t know.
Tetris
[BREAK=Battery]
Battery Life
I am yet to watch a movie at a stretch on this player so I cannot comment on its battery life with that. The company claimed is 6 Hrs for video and 12 Hrs for audio. The newer firmware seems to have improved the battery life (as per its website).
Here is a picture of how the screen where battery information is available. I don’t know what that graph is. :S
One very good thing is that when we are watching any movie at that time only we have a shortcut to see battery information (in percentage) which is extremely helpful.
The battery life when watching movie on TV is great (as the LCD screen is not in operation). I watched a movie yesterday (on TV) when the battery was like 88% and after 2.5 Hrs the battery was still at 66% which is excellent IMO.
[BREAK=Player Information and Final Points]
Firmware and Other Information
Final points
I bought this player after deciding on first my budget and then on the features. I am happy that I was able to get this thing at right price. As of now I feel this player is really VFM. I hope they improve the MKV support and ability to play higher bitrate MKV files. The PMP is also light in weight.
I have not mentioned about the OTG functionality here wherein you can connect a USB drive (pen drive) directly to the player because in my case I was not able to make it work or probably I was doing something wrong. Will update later on that front.
Damages: This PMP cost me 500 RMB (approx 3500 Rupees) for only the player and I payed 80 RMB (approx 560 Rupees) for the Case, video and audio cable, screen guard and OTG Cable.
Where to buy ??
This player is mainly available (in stores) in China only I suppose. But I have seen on amazon.com and even on ebay (US and some other country ebay sites). MP4Nation.net does not carry this player.
Thanks. Comments are welcome
