Summary: 2005-07-07 05:33:14 I have the Joybee 110 with 128 MB of RAM. I put my review here because the 128 MB Joybee is no longer listed – I assume the device is pretty much the same as the 256 MB.
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My Joybee 110 is a delight to listen too. I love the sound quality. That all this music can come out of this tiny, very portable, with no movable parts thing is amazing. And the voice recorder is great – several people I’ve shown it to were impressed with it.
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Most of the mp3 players that I’ve looked at seem to have about 10 hour batter life with one AAA battery. I wanted to avoid these battery eaters. The iRiver player was an exception, rated at 40 hours on one AA battery. Even better is the Sony NW-E75 playing 70 hours on one AAA battery (hard to believe).
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But the Joybee 110 has a rechargeable Li-On battery built into it that recharges whenever it is attached to the computer via the USB port. This was a big plus for me. I don’t think the battery is replaceable. The battery life is rated to last 10 hours before it needs recharging. There is an indicator on the LCD screen that always displays the battery charge. The sound quality of the player remains good right up to the moment the player turns off due to low battery charge. If I charge the battery up fully then play it one hour a day, it last about 5 and one half days. If I fully charge the player up and play it continually until it shuts off due to no battery charge, it will last about 7.5 hours. This was true the day I got it and again when I tested it four months later after using it most every day. It takes about 1.5 hours to fully charge a dead battery. I usually leave my Joybee plugged up to the computer.
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I also wanted the voice recording feature that came with many of these mp3 players. You can turn on the voice recorder, stick this mp3 player in your shirt pocket and forget about it – it records a conversation. The voice recorder function allows you to record in four different quality modes recording to mp3 files at 32 kbps, 96 kbps and 128 kbps and a very low quality, but small TVF files. The TVF file records something in the neighborhood of 6 kbps. In other words my Joybee 110 with 128MB memory can record a 2.25 hour conversation at the best quality. It could record 48 hours (I think) at the lowest TVF quality if only the battery lasted that long. I can easily click and drag these recording files to my computer using Mircosoft windows for storage. I’ve impressed several people with the recording sound quality of my Joybee.
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My Joybee comes with 128MB of flash drive memory. When I got my Joybee there seemed to be only 100MB available, but formatting the memory (by accident) I found that I recovered the missing memory. I recently did fill the 128MB memory with 59 wma formatted songs at 64 kbps. This is about 4 hours of music. The USB 1.1 transfer for my Joybee is slow, several times slower than USB 2.0. It takes about 5 minutes to fill the 128MB of Joybee with music (it took 10 minutes before formatting).
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From one CD music track I created 17 different music using the Windows Media Player and the Joybee software QMusic2. The Joybee 110 played all these formats flawlessly. I created wma formats at 48, 64, 96, 128, 160,192 kbps, wma variable bit rate formats at 52, 109, 175, 302 kbps and mp3 formats at 32, 56, 64, 96, 128, 192, 256 kbps. (FYI, I typically save my music on the computer in 64 kbps wma format or if I can’t do that, then 128 kbps mp3 format.)
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The popcorn earphones that come with my Joybee just fall out my ears. The crystal over the LCD display is convex – it bulges out making the display difficult to read under point source lighting (such as a lamp). A flat crystal (or even better -- concave) would have simply solved this problem.
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The Joybee flash drive memory maintains two folders MP3 and MICIN. The voice recorder stores all recorded sounds to the MICIN folder. All music downloaded from your computer go in the MP3 folder. I transfer music to the MP3 folder using Microsoft Windows click and drag, or copy and paste. You can create other folders within the flash memory to store any files. The Joybee, however, only plays music in the MP3 folder. It will not play music in a folder that is in the MP3 folder.
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The Joybee plays the music in the order they were put there, or in a random order if you wish. There is no way to zero in on music from one particular album, or artist. You can choose a particular track to play by scrolling through the selections on the LCD. If you have 60 songs on your Joybee, that becomes tedious.
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It took about five months (and several attempts at communication via e-mail and phone) to get my rebate on this product. Joybee never responded to two pre-purchase questions that I asked through their web-site.
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My first Joybee was defective. It would only play sound for the right ear. BenQ replaced the player under warranty in about a week in an easy procedure.
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