MP3 PLAYERS

A FEW YEARS AGO YOU LOOKED POSH IF YOU HAD A 32MB MP3 PLAYER. NOW YOU CAN FIT UP TO 60GB OF MUSIC IN YOUR POCKET. SO GET READY TO RIP YOUR ENTIRE CD COLLECTION AS WE DELVE INTO THE ROCKING WORLD OF HARD DISK MP3 PLAYERS

Rio Karma

Manufacturer:	Price:
Rio	£215 inc VAT
Reviewer:	Review Date:
	Dec 2004

	OVERALL RATING

SCORE

5/6

Verdict: An excellent player, but it's beaten by the Zen Touch's extra style and battery life

The first thing you notice about the Rio Karma is its distinctive, palm-friendly shape. All the controls are a mere thumb movement away. Although there's an indexed scroll wheel, it's also possible to use the keypad for navigating through the menus, which is usually a little easier.

The interface is excellently designed, and very easy and quick to use. Uniquely, when displaying a list of tracks or artists, it indexes each entry alphabetically so you can select a letter first, before narrowing down your search. With 20GB of music, this is almost essential, as choosing the right music to play can often be daunting with several hundred albums in front of you. Because of this, Rio has implemented a DJ system, which selects tracks based on settings such as the least played or most listened to. RioDJ works really well, but it's no longer streets ahead of the competition.

When the Karma is plugged into your computer, you can't access it as a mass storage device. This is because of the advanced file system it uses, which stores all the ID3 data. This does have its advantages, though, primarily because you can flick through the track list at an impressively rapid speed. Also, tracks that blend together do so without faltering.

Another unique feature of the Karma is an Ethernet connection on the supplied dock. Unfortunately, it's been disappointingly implemented. You have to access the device across the network and use a Java client in order to upload and download tracks. Transferring tracks across the network is also very slow. It would have been great to access the Karma as a shared hard disk across a network, but it wasn't to be. The dock also has a phono line-out so you can plug it into a stereo.

The Rio has many features that make it better than the iPod, such as OGG Vorbis and WMA support, a solid15-hour battery life and a bundled dock, which Apple makes you pay extra for. Sound quality is as good as the Zen Touch, but Creative's player looks better, has much longer battery life and, crucially, costs £35 less.

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