Home > Consumer Reviews > TREND MICR GOVT INTERSCAN VIRUSWALL CSP ( VWNF0029 )

I bought this unit, compact, 32mb internal memory, great deal, right! Well, maybe not. (I wouldn't pay a penny more).

Although what looks like a nifty compact design this mp3 player has some SERIOUS PROBLEMS:

1) HEADPHONES. VERY POOR SOUND QUALITY. At first I thought the unit itself delivered poor sound quality. Turned out to be the headphones. A child MIGHT not notice, but you will. Non-standard jack size, 3/32" or 2.5mm, compared to the standard 1/8" or 3.5mm. This size plug is used for cell phone and hearing aid headphones (if you are half deaf this one is for you). I cannot find high quality replacements (I have searched DESPARATELY on the web - NOTHING).With good headphones and the adapter the unit sounded good, but already poor battery life suffers when using quality standard mini headphones.

2) NO CLIP. This unit is small and lightweight, but unless you put it in a pocket that closes or snaps or is deep the unit will fall out. Or you can hold it. That gets old REAL fast.

3) PC Interface. At 1st looks great. Drag and drop from your mp3 folder to a standard portable drive folder. But my PC locked up each time. And if you disconnect the unit for a moment, the drive interface disappears and I had to reboot my computer just to continue adding songs. Also the USB cable on the unit end is NOT USB and is proprietary. Lose this cord and you are out of luck.

4) BATTERY LIFE. One AAA battery. This unit needs to "get a life". Stock up or get rechargeables. If you plan to listen for more than an hour or two you will have to carry replacements.

5) NO EXPANDABLE MEMORY. What do you want for the price? At the regular price this would be unacceptable.

SUMMARY:
Wait 'till this one goes on clearance and buy it as a stocking stuffer for the kids at Christmas. I think it is marginally worth that, but wouldn't touch it for one penny more. Or let Santa take it to the land of misfit toys where it belongs.

It installed in 5 minutes on my Windows 98 computer. (There was supposed to be a floppy containing the Windows 98 driver in the package, but the floppy was missing. I got the driver from the company's web site.) In Windows 98, it shows up as a separate drive, so I just dragged & dropped files onto the drive. I deleted files by opening the drive on my desktop & deleting the files. It holds 32 mb of mp3 files. I loaded files with bitrates ranging from 16k mono (which fits an hour of very low-fi spoken-word old time radio into a 7 mb file) to 192k stereo & it handled them all (except for one file which, although it plays perfectly on my computer, had a distorted stretch in the mp3 player).

Sound was pleasant through the supplied earbud headphones. It has an oddball headphone jack--smaller than a regular mini jack. The earbuds weren't round--they were oddly shaped. I tried every possible position in my ear (I also tried switching them from one ear to the other) & they were extremely uncomfortable in every position. They drove me nuts. Maybe my ears are misshapen? Maybe an electronics store sells an adapter to convert the oddball headphone jack to a regular mini jack?

To get the computer to recognize the mp3 player again after it had been unplugged from the computer, I had to unplug the usb cable from the computer, then plug it back in.

It has to carried in the pocket--there's no belt clip.

The fast forward button has a dual function--it would fast-forward through the current song or advance to the next track, depending on whether I kept the button depressed or not. But the rewind button has only a single function--it only goes back to the last track; it would not rewind the current song.

Battery life was 2 hours of continuous play on a fresh alkaline (unless the battery was used when I was adding or deleting songs, in which case the battery life was much less). I can't speak to the standby battery life issue mentioned by the other reviewer, because I fired this battery-chomping hog back at the store's return desk before standby battery life became an issue!

For someone who is looking for a tiny, inexpensive mp3 player and is willing to tolerate the quirks listed above, the DRMP3P01 may be just the thing. But mine was returned to the Land of Misfit Toys.

I purchased one of these products and have had nothing but trouble with it. It is poorly contructed and has an extremely short standby battery life. (i.e. less than 3 days). I had the unit replaced and I was able to get 4 days of standby time out of it. It appears that thier QA/QC function at Digital Research is non-existent. It almost appears like they made an engineering change in the middle of a production run. The hardware is not worthy of being considered as a doorstop. The software is buggy and has problems, especially with the newer operating systems (WinME, Win2K, and WinXP) It locked up my system and I had to remove it so my system would become stable again!

This item does not contain the correct drivers for Windows XP. Tried to locate the drivers from the company but the website is not accessable. Tried digital research technologies home page - page not found. The company was bought out by IOM holdings of Nevada but that was not help either. You would think someone would check their product before sending it out to market.

I bought one of these around Christmas time. I have Windows XP and on the back of the MP3 package there is a sticker that says "it is not necessary to format the MP3 player with Windows XP". Well in the instructions they tell you to format it for all other versions so I went ahead and formated. What they meant when they put that sticker ont he package was "DO NOT FORMAT THE MP3 PLAYER IF YOU HAVE WINDOWS XP OR YOU WILL RUIN THE MP3 PLAYER".

I returned the original player and waited an entire MONTH. I now have tried it out and it's great!!! Very easy to use and to transfer files to. The sound is really good and as it claims there is no skipping. A great deal for the money. Earphones fit MY ears fine.

Again, just be careful about formating.

Oh, one final thing- IOMagic and Digital Research tech support is probably the worst I have ever dealt with so beware. I give the packaging/instructions 1 star, tech support a negative 1, and the product itself 5 stars.