Features
The Rio Carbon Pearl plays MP3s and WMA (including DRM-protected WMAs), as well as Audible files for virtual bookworms. Unlike the larger and more complicated Rio Karma, it does not support OGG or FLAC. Complete with a mic-level meter, the Carbon is also a handy voice recorder that captures audio as WAV files through its decent microphone. It's also an ideal way to store and carry essential data files.
The Carbon's strength is its simplicity -- it's a player for those who just want to listen to music. Part of this strength is derived from the clean, mature onscreen interface. The main menu includes: Play Music, Bookmarks, Settings, Voice Recorder, Recordings and Stopwatch. Diving into menu folders is an in-and-out affair, but the interface transitions are quick and tidy. Selecting the Play Music category takes you to a wealth of options, including Play All, Album, Artist, Genre, Track, Year, New Music, Playlist, Spoken Word and Recordings.
Menu highlights include a five-band custom equaliser, simple voice recording and a nifty bookmarking feature that not only takes you instantly back to the same place in a song, but also remembers the player's settings. In fact, you can easily bookmark songs by pressing and holding the Select button and choosing one of nine bookmark spaces.
There's lots of motion onscreen, with scrolling song info, a track-position bar and time elapsed. It's very tranquil, especially with the soothing backlighting turned on, then slowly fading to off. There's also a View mode that displays bit rate, codec, copyright protection and size, as well as the always handy date and time. The Carbon even has a customisable Lock setting, meaning you can program some functions -- such as volume -- to work even when the software hold function is on.
Software and drivers aren't an issue. Rio supplies its own much-improved Rio Music Manager, but the Carbon is also compatible with Windows Media Player 10.0 and Apple iTunes, although the latter requires a plug-in. And it works with any of the music services that rely on WMA, such as Napster or MSN Music. The Carbon takes advantage of the latest technology to deliver a better user experience. It can autosync with Windows Media Player 10.0 and Rio Music Manager, a useful feature if you have more than 5GB of music. It will eventually support Microsoft's new digital rights management protocol (often referred to as Janus) that lets you transfer and play subscription-based music in addition to purchased tracks. This last feature didn't make it into the box; instead, it will be available as a free flash upgrade, although we've been waiting for months.
The Rio Carbon isn't perfect, however -- it's missing several features found on larger players. There's no FM tuner, no line-in recording and no hardware hold button. The interface has a few quirks too. Most notably, there's no way to create a playlist while on the go, an especially important feature on high-capacity players such as the Carbon. During testing, we also found that if you use the jog wheel when selecting menu options, you'll get kicked out of the menu and back into Player mode -- a minor annoyance when you're surfing the menus.
Performance
One of the Rio Carbon Pearl's strongest selling points is its battery life. In our tests, it lasted slightly more than 20 hours, an excellent performance. The Carbon Pearl's lithium-ion battery is charged via USB.
Sound quality also rates very highly, with punchy, hiss-free sound. The Carbon could be louder, as we were only able to crank it up using the custom equaliser. While the included earbuds are termed 'high quality', the Carbon deserves to be listened to on bigger headphones. Transfer time over USB 2.0 was a solid 3.2MB per second.
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Edited by Jasmine France
Additional editing by Nick Hide
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User reviews2
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chris lynch 15 July 2005
Good: its better than the ipod mini in every single way with extra features (sept for playlists)
Bad: no matter what i say here you wont buy one, becuase there isnt a ipod logo on the back
Comment: This is all you need an basically my summary says why. People who are looking for an mp3 player in this sort of price/size range, there is absaloutely no reason to get the ipod over the rio unless 1) you want the scroll wheel or 2) you desperately need playlists 3) you need to be like everyone else.
To conclude its superior battery length (normally over 20 hours) and battery life no theres no www.ipodsdirtysecret.com for this player, looks, size. And most importantly before i forget the most important thing plug-and-play, which for all you ipod users means i dont need itunes change the songs from wma, and have to install it on every computer i go to meaining it can be used as a portable hard drive. And ohh yea, you'll be saving a whole load of money. Please get this spectacular player.
(on a side not hold menu and press the middle button in to hold)
any more questions feel free to ask me
chris lynch 15 July 2005
Good: sexy, sleek, easy handling, humongous battery life, unlike review says there is a hold switch and finally its a true ipod beater
Bad: no matter what i say people wont buy this becuase there isnt a shiny apple logo on the case
Comment: This is all you need an basically my summary says why. People who are looking for an mp3 player in this sort of price/size range, there is absaloutely no reason to get the ipod over the rio unless 1) you want the scroll wheel or 2) you desperately need playlists 3) you need to be like everyone else.
To conclude its superior battery length (normally over 20 hours) and battery life no theres no www.ipodsdirtysecret.com for this player, looks, size. And most importantly before i forget the most important thing plug-and-play, which for all you ipod users means i dont need itunes change the songs from wma, and have to install it on every computer i go to meaining it can be used as a portable hard drive. And ohh yea, you'll be saving a whole load of money. Please get this spectacular player.
See all 2 user reviews