I purchased this tiiiny MP3 player in early 2009, prior to going to Peru on a long mountain-trekking "holiday". THe idea was that this player will keep me company whilst I'm lying in tents at high altitudes, and whilst hiking for up to 18 k.m a day, with half my weight worth of stuff on my back!
Anyways, the player it self was reaonbly good, in terms of sound quality and some of the features. It worked well during the trip and came in handy- quite literally- as it's very very tiny in size and fits quite nearly in to your pocket .
Ohh one of it's BEST features(why i'd purchased it in the first place).. is it's well-advertised 60 HOUR.. battery life(for each charge, not for life time! LOL)
UNfortunately the damn thing died on me a few months later- for seemingly NO reason!(meaning, no damage caused by my self). Sinc ei paid a small fortune for it, i was not happy with this turn of events, as you can imagine!
Anyways, from a professional(as an engineer) and technical perspective, AND based on experience, I'm afraid I will not recommend people buy this product, unless they're happy to take risks with £90 for an 8GB audio player with NO video playing ability.
I don't particularly trust some of these newly-formed electronics manufacturers in the Far East. Thry use pretty much certainly.. use inferior quality electronic circuit boards and components, and cur corners in various tages of the engineering projec tlife cycle, in order to give us these "mega deals"! BIG NO NO, for me.
Truths needs to be heard!
The I Audio 7 is about the same size as the average mobile phone, its compact nature is all well but it comes with the compromise of having a rather small screen only measuring 2.5cm, which is undoubtedly unsuitable to watch videos for an extended period of time.
With a well designed menu system it is easy to use even for gadget novices. The tracks can be choose by simply sliding your thumb across the player's elegant touch sensitive controls, this feature is called Swing Touch, it works brilliantly especially when combined with the navigation layouts, resulting in a user friendly product.
When using the supplied headphones, it produces satisfactory sound quality with reasonable crisp treble and a good amount of bass. Upon using an additional pair of headphones, there was a noticeable increase in audio clarity.
The player is also compatible with both Mac and PC operating systems. It also supports a wide range of audio files such as WMA, FLAC, WAV OGG and MP3.
After a continuous charge for about 3.5 hours, the player managed to provide about 19 hours of video playback on average which is exceptional. It managed to provide continuous playback of audio files for up to 45 hours on average which is obviously quite a long battery stamina. To some extent, its charge period is quite long when transferring audio files, it hard managed to copy 10 megabytes in 14 secs which is somewhat slow.