Sylvania 2GB SMP2002 Compact MP3 Player

Comment: My husband bought me one of these MP3 players because they were on sale half price at Walgreens. Complete waste of money. I fully charged the battery as directed, loaded it up with MP3s and was looking forward to going out for a run with some music to accompany me. Not 5 minutes into my run, the player shuts off. I try to turn it back on, thinking maybe I accidentally bumped the on/off switch. It turns back on, but then shuts off a few seconds later. So I figure maybe I didn't charge the battery correctly. I carefully review the instructions again, charge the battery until the LED indicator alerts me that the battery is charged. I unplug the player from my computer and make sure the player is turned off so that the battery doesn't end up draining overnight. The next day, I try once again taking the player with me on my run. It plays for about 10 minutes, and shuts off again inexplicably. Same problem as the day before; I turn it back on, it plays for a few seconds, and shuts off. Now I am REALLY frustrated.

At this point, I simply chalk the player off as a loss. We had only paid $7 for it and evidently, it was barely worth that. So I search on Amazon for a different MP3 player and happen upon this one (the exact same as what my husband bought at Walgreens). I noticed that one of the reviewers, who seemed to really like hers, mentioned that the instructions that came with her player were not very clear and that she had downloaded the instructions from a certain website, so I did, too, thinking maybe the instructions I had were missing something, too. Well they seem to be the exact same instructions as what came with my player, but I go ahead and read them again, and charge the player's battery yet again. Once fully charged, I turn the player on and it starts playing. I try to adjust the volume; it immediately shuts off. I turn it back on, try the forward and backward function; that seems to work. But as soon as I try to adjust the volume or pause, it shuts off. Okay, let's see what happens if I turn it back on and not touch it. Well now it seems to be happy; it's been playing nonstop for over a half hour now. So basically, as long as I don't touch it, it works fine. :-/ So my guess is the player is probably defective and the jostling from my runs was enough to cause it to keep shutting off. How practical.

Something else to be aware of is that it may have 2GB of space, but every time you turn the player on, it starts on the first song in your playlist. If you only plan on using it during short periods of time - during a workout, for example - it really won't matter how many songs you have on this player; you'll end up hearing the same songs over and over again. There's no shuffle function, so all you can really do is skip ahead one song at a time until you end up with a new list, which is really annoying and takes forever.

This is, of course, if you have a player that actually works the way it is supposed to, unlike the piece of crap I ended up with. Panasonic has a player for only $12.99 that also has an FM tuner and includes an LCD screen; I will be giving that one a try.

Comment: It is about 1 inch square, has a built-in clip for your shirt or gym shorts, comes with a USB cable and ear buds, and is reasonably priced. I have only had it a short time, and do not know about long-term reliability. Still, I like it a lot and do recommend it.
First problem: the included earbuds are pretty mediocre. If you are serious about music sound quality, you should use high quality earphones.
Mainly, though, is the "User Manual". The one in the package has several, rather obvious mistakes. I went to the official Sylvania website, clicked over a few times, and wound up at the Curtis International website. There, I was able to download the correct manual in pdf format.
Mainly, I could not figure out when the player was finished charging. The pdf manual has the answer: there are 2 LED's. The LED next to the on/off switch simply tells you that the USB cable is getting juice; the LED next to the earphone hole will turn off when the internal battery is fully charged.
I have since figured out that this thing, when plugged into a powered external USB hub, only requires a couple of minutes to fully charge.

Comment: I bought several of these as gifts to download audio books. I don't know if they are faulty or just finicky. The manual is of no help. The first player I downloaded about 3 books with about 12 chapters each and a total of 1/3 the space. I tested the device and it seemed to work fine for skipping to the next chapter. However, when I added the forth book filling 2/3 the space, the forward button would keep going to the 3rd chapter of book 1 over and over. The back button would circle around to the last chapter of the 4th book loaded. When I turned the player off and on, it would start where I left off. I have no idea what the steady red light means verses the blinking red. I told my friend he would just have to start by listening from chapter 3 for now (it's a self help books so he didn't need to hear it in order necessarily).

My 5th book put me over the 2.0 GB and had 7 discs broken down into 20 sections per disc. By turning the 20 sections into 1 (very time consuming set-up), I was able to get the size down. After doing 4 discs, I noticed that each was over an hour of listening time, so the remaining 3 discs were broken into 2 parts each.

I then loaded the second device to full capacity with all 5 books. When I tested it, I still couldn't seem to get the skipping to the next chapter to work properly. When I turned this player off and on it always started with book 1 chapter 1. So then I thought, maybe an hour and 15 minutes for the first chapter is too much processing time for the skip to work? I took off one of the books and reloaded the oversize book that was originally broken down into 5 minute segments. I renamed this book so that it would now be the first book. Again, skipping problems where it would pick one random segment and keep jumping to that one. I could never get to book 2 or go from segment 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, etc.

As I said, the manual is worthless. On to more theory and trouble shooting. Maybe the problem is that each book was in a titled folder. I pulled all the books out of the folders and renamed them as such:
book 1 was titled with the following chapters: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12
book 2 was titled: a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r
book 3 was titled: zig1, zig2, zig3, zig4 zig5, thru zig12

Whoa! That experiment didn't work! When I played it this time the fast forward would just randomly choose. I'd hit forward and jump to k, the next forward would take me to 5, the next forward to zig 7, the forward after that to b.

I'm out of time now but the next step is to try completely erasing the player and loading with folders again keeping chapters to under 15 minutes each. I'm also considering trying to load just the one book with the hour long sections to see if it will skip properly when the player is only 30% full. I also have 4 other players to see how they behave.