Something for St. Valentine's Day

Mitashi has launched a new MP3 player – the MPF 1001. The body is made of jet-black non-reflective material, which seems to be scratch-resistant.

A 2-colour OLED display provides basic navigational indications, and displays MP3 ID3 tags. OLEDs are more energy efficient as compared to LCDs, but the low battery life of the player hardly reflects this. The Li-ion battery can be recharged via USB, and Mitashi also provides a 2-pin power adapter.

Button placement is not intuitive. There is a centre button and a button each in the four directions. However, the centre button is just for playback (instead of the usual Select), while the top "Menu" button is for "Select". The one at the bottom brings up the volume control during playback. The left and right buttons are for moving forward and backward, and also up and down. All the buttons are somewhat hard to press, and are sometimes sluggish or even unresponsive.
 
The MPF 1001 recognises MP3 and WMA, but we would have liked support for formats such as AAC. Performance-wise, the sound lacks punch: while the treble is passable, the bass is seriously deficient. The bundled earphones do not help either. On top of that, they aren't comfortable, and we can't recommend they be worn for more than a couple of hours.

Storage capacity is 1 GB. The device supports two storage modes: Media Class Storage, in which the player is recognised as a removable drive, and Media Transfer Mode, which allows you to sync the device using WMP10 to transfer MP3 files to the player.

Despite support for USB 2.0, data transfer is quite slow: it took us two minutes to transfer 100 MB.
 
The MPH 1001 comes with a car stereo adapter that lets you play songs on your car Hi-Fi. Along with FM radio and voice recording, there are two headphone jacks – Valentine's Day material!

Specifications: 1 GB; Audio format: MP3, WMA; 2-colour OLED; Dual-earphone sockets; Earphones; Car stereo adapter; USB 2.0

Performance: 2.5
Features: 3.5
Ease of use: 2
Value for money: 3
Overall: 3

Contact: Mitashi Edutainment Private Limited
Telephone: 022-5006661
E-mail: contact@mitashi.com
Website: www.mitashi.com
Price: Rs.3,690