I just bought my first pair of ‘noise-isolating’ earbuds today — SonicGear’s EarPump. I paid RM 39.90, so I wasn’t expecting much from them.

I was wrong. The fit is excellent — with three different sizes of rubber in-ear seals to choose from, and a spare set of the medium seals there’s something for most ear sizes. In my case, the mediums fit perfectly and comfortably, sealing out most outside noise.

Overall I’m quite happy with sound reproduction. Treble comes through loud and clear, with bass being a little too far on the restrained side for me. The mid-range is somewhat strong, but that doesn’t bother me too much. Overall I’m quite happy with sound reproduction though I wish the bass was a little more defined.

Apart from the headphones and extra seals, the package comes with a carry case which has spare room for a small MP3 player; something along the lines of a Creative Zen Stone would fit perfectly in there with the phones.

A serious problem that has emerged after my testing is that the majority of MP3s in my library aren’t ripped well enough and have a constant background noise to them. My commercially purchased tracks, as well as higher bit-rate rips sound excellent however.

P.S.: I think EarPump sounds like something you’d rather not have happen to yourself :(

Before I forget how to find this article again, I’ll just blog it. By the way this works fine for a K850i too — Synchronising a K610i with Evolution.

Yeah, I caved and got myself a 1GB flash based MP3 player:

(Mine’s black)

Sound Quality

As usual for a Sony product, excellent. It comes with AVLS — Sony’s fancy acronym for what basically artificially limits the volume to levels below that which would render you deaf by 30. Custom and preset equalizers, some form of normalization (not sure how it works, but it seems to) and of course, a decent pair of headphones. Not much more to say really.

Aesthetics

To say it looks good is an understatement. From the semi-transparent skin, to the flush screen, it’s all good. The front panel itself is actually a transparent plastic piece, with all wording and logos printed beneath it. Below the panel is then the actual layer that gives it colour. Quite a nice, subtle effect.

The flush screen is just awesome. It looks like they somehow managed to integrate the screen into the actual surface of the player — you can’t see the usual screen boundaries even if you try. The only hint you get that it’s just an effect is in the dark when you can see the backlight glowing around the square plate.

It comes in a really handy form factor too. It’s somewhat larger than the average thumbdrive, which makes it really easy to just slip into your pocket and forget about.

Interface

With a screen that small, I expected something of a headache when it came to navigating the various menus. Surprisingly though, most of the time it works well. I’ve not had to resort to reading the manual at all. The one irritating thing about the player was that it defaulted to beeping with each action (Next, Previous, Stop, Open menu etc.) but that was easy enough to turn off — Options -> Advanced -> Beep | Off.

The Software

SonicStage, the application used to manage the player quite frankly not going to win any awards. It’s alright for it’s stated job, but you won’t see me using it to play music regularly. Thankfully, there are various third party applications that work fine at managing the files on the player, and quite a few of them are Java based, which makes this player Linux compatible. Shocking eh?

Verdict

Overall, a good buy. Sony needs a kick where it hurts for the disaster of SonicStage, but since there are many applications that do a good job of music management, it’s not so bad.

I got an iPAQ 6365 Pocket PC based phone about two months ago. Here’s the late review.

On first impression, it looks rather like a normal PDA, but with a stub of aerial sticking out the top left corner of it. Nice weighty feel to it, and the construction is rather solid — no flexing, or creaking. The sides of it have a rubberised grip so its quite difficult to accidentally drop the thing, which is a good thing, cause I tend to drop my phones…

It does everything that standard Windows Mobile or Pocket PC based PDAs do really. As far as phone functions go, you get all the standards — a dialpad, detailed call history, speed dial, and speakerphone. As far as audio quality goes, it is the best phone I’ve ever used. Voices come out sounding good, and the mic is excellent — I know this since I use it for voice notes as well, and even with background noise it maintains a good level of clarity.

A friend also purchased an h6365, and he remarked that It doesn’t excel at any one thing, but rather, it does it all. I have to agree with him. I regularly use it to play music, receive/make phone calls, message, schedule appointments and tasks, take notes, and many other small things. While it does everything I expect, it can get messy at times.

Perhaps my only complaint is the somewhat slower than usual processor. At 200MHz it isn’t quite a pig when it comes to performance, but still I’ve only felt the need for more speed once — I was opening a 250MB indexed ebook … On the flip side, the slower processor has one benefit — battery life is excellent. I go for days without cradling the unit even though it doubles up as a music player.