Page 4 - Testing and Conclusion
The picture was taken when I was on the plane back to Calgary during my first summer vacation... yes... vacation, where I have to bring review units along.
Since the Nextar T30 is a multimedia unit instead of a plain old digital audio player, we'll test and give our opinion based on two aspects: Multimedia performance and battery life -- simply because these are the most important aspects of this product. Since we already discussed the pictures function on the previous page, and we got no e-books kicking around, they won't be addressed in this review.
Audio/Video Performance
Before we start on that, I got one thing to complain about -- file performance. It's the slowest I've ever seen on any removable flash device before. With a write speed of 400KB/s on average, all I have to say is... good luck filling that 4GB of storage. I didn't really bother with that after 20 or so songs; for videos and the such I plugged in an SD card and inserted into the slot for it to play instead. This is really unacceptable.
The audio performance is only average at best. But we'll start with the volume -- this is generally the same as other players; at 1/3 of the maximum volume it's already plenty loud with most earphones. At max, it's more than good enough to blast your ears deaf. In terms of audio quality, there's nothing too much to talk about. Even with our incredibly punchy V-MODA Vibes, it could not take advantage of Nextar T30's audio output -- midrange is evidently more prominent than the treble and bass, unfortunately it does not sound natural. Not to mention that it's also dark and slightly muffled to an extent. Bass is acceptable; rounded but not very powerful. Like we said before, the Nextar T30 does not respond well to equalizer setting changes, so even at that point it didn't really help. The treble is recessed and definitely can be sharper, wetter, and higher in general.
To sum it all up, there's not a lot of detail in the sound output with our standard 192k to 320k CBR LAME MP3 files we used for our testing -- layering is not very evident; it's not as clean as you'd expect in general. The only thing that we can give positive comments to is the signal to noise ratio, which is definitely done right in this regard -- but I can't say that I haven't seen better.
As far as videos goes, it's very picky for format and resolution as we previously mentioned. But when it works, it's smooth, and its large 3.5" LCD is very nice. With decent picture quality in terms of color and response time, even for its relatively low resolution videos and pictures are pretty good.
Battery Performance
Nextar rates the T30 at 8 hours for music and 4 hours for video. For music, we got only 6.5 hours, 3 hours for video and approximately 5 hours under mixed usage of pictures/music/video (But it's mostly music during the time). Volume is set at 1/3 with V-MODA Vibe earphones plugged in and everything else on default settings.
Okay, here's a product that has a large screen, and plays music and video, for MSRP $99 at major retailers such at Wal-Mart. The Nextar T30 is also a player with many great ideas -- but unfortunately, not very well executed in various extents. Physically speaking, the controls aren't very intuitive nor responsive, and the 2.5mm to 3.5mm converter for the headphone jack is a hassle to use. The user interface has room for improvement. But we have some other major complaints: it has by far the slowest flash memory we've seen to date, no SDHC support, and audio performance is mediocre to slightly better than average at best. On the other hand, video performance with the large 3.5" LCD is surprisingly decent -- without regard for how video-picky it is, of course. In that sense, with again mediocre battery life and only 90-day warranty, I can't see myself recommending the Nextar T30 right at this moment, but it's definitely a good start. With the possible improvements that I discussed in this review, this product certainly has lots of potential in the future. However, in its current form, the Creative Zen 4GB (The most recent one, anyway) probably offers you much better performance and more intuitive controls for roughly the same price. You won't be able to find a player with such a large screen at this price range, but there's simply too much to give up to receive this privilege in my opinion with the Nextar T30.
Special thanks to Rita representing Nextar for making this review possible.
APH Review Focus Summary:
6/10 means A product with its advantages, but drawbacks should not be ignored before purchasing.
5/10 means An average product with no real advantage; drawbacks and advantages just seems to cancel each other out.
-- Final APH Numeric Rating is 5.5/10
Please note that the APH Numeric Rating system is based off our proprietary guidelines in the Review Focus, and should not be compared to other sites.
The Nextar T30 is a digital audio player full of great ideas and excellent potential, at least on paper. But many aspects are not very well executed that leaves it tons of room for improvement.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. Physical Look - Outside
3. Usage and User Interface
4. Testing and Conclusion
