Hip Street 8gb Touchscreen Review

I saw this little 8gb touchscreen player on sale at Walgreens.com for $89 and had to have a look. The Hip Street Portable Multimedia Player arrived a few days later, and it turns out to be quite a value for the features it includes. The package included a media convertor on mini CD, manual, AC charger, USB cable, lanyard, earbuds, and the player with stylus.

Feature are abundant. The Hip Street includes:

- Touch Screen Interface

- 8gb internal memory.

- Music: MP3, WMA

-- A to B repeat

-- Lyrics display

- Videos: AVI

- Pictures: JPG

- Text: TXT

- FM radio, FM recording

- (High quality) Voice Recording

- File Browser, with on-board delete option.

- Sleep (power off) timer

- EQ: Normal, 3D, Rock, Pop, Classic, Bass, Jazz, and one USER defined setting.

- Built-in loud Speaker

- Comes with stylus that stores in edge of device, uses finger or stylus.

- Screen 2.8" diagonal, 2.25" x 1.625", 320 x 240 pixels

- Body 3.625" x 2.125" x 3/8" thick.

- Includes earplugs, USB cable, Wall charger, Wrist strap long enough to wear as a necklace, small install CD (with AVIconverter program), instructions in two languages, stylus, player.

- T-flash card slot
- firmware upgradeable, (but not recommeded if product is functioning normally

- No driver needed under win 2000/XP/ME/Vista

My first impressions:

- FM radio sound quality was average.

- Music sounded fine using good headphones. Throw away the included earbuds.

- Interface doesn't take good advantage of direct touch, instead using on-screen arrows to move you up and down in menus. It feels like the interface from a non- touchscreen player was ported over, with little consideration for making the interface more efficient using direct touch input.

- Memory slot takes microSD and will read up to 8gb cards. For $36 you can add an 8gb card to have a 16gb player for $125.

- The included software does a good job of coverting movies to play on the Hip Street. Every major format including DVD VOB files can be converted to the AVI format required by the Hip Street.

- No external volume control, but on-screen controls are always visible.

- Shiny, aluminum alloy, brushed chrome finish is fingerprint magnet.

- Very light weight.

- Very impressed with the features it has.

Not the best sounding, but an amazingly feature-laden device for $90.

Amazingly compact. Here it is next to the Samsung P2. Just as thin. Lighter.

Conclusion? This is an amazing value for a media player with these features and capacity. Although no awards will be won for the interface or the sound quality, both are competent and will match whatever an iPod Nano can produce. This Hip Street player is almost the same size as a Nano, half the price, with more features. The built-in speaker isn't of great quality, but does let you listen without headphones. I don't recommend it for music, but it's perfectly acceptable for spoken podcasts or audiobooks.

4D