The BenQ Joybee 120 is a cute digital audio player that supports both MP3 and WMA music files. It's no bigger than a box of matches and, unbelievably, weighs about the same.
It's very simple to connect to a PC using the supplied USB cable, where it is identified by Windows as another removable drive. As such, you can drag and drop up to 128Mb of audio and data files into the player's internal memory.
Obviously, the Joybee's small form is it's big feature, but we had a couple of gripes about it's other design quirks. In playback mode, for example, you need three button presses just to alter the volume or activate the 'hold' feature. We also found that the Joybee ignores ID3 tags and orders tracks by file name.
The supplied headphones have their own volume control but they aren't that good. Replacing the headphones would improve the sound quality.
As well as playing your MP3s you can also listen to the radio. The search facility is incredibly slow - it took almost five minutes to cycle through the whole FM frequency - but once a station is found though, you do have the option of recording live radio. There is also a voice recorder function for recording speech.
Contact: BenQ 01442 301 000
www.benq-eu.com
See also:
The music industry has finally worked out how to make money out of internet music downloads. But will legal online music services be as popular as P2P sites? 18 Jun 2004
This MP3 player is bigger than others with similar storage capacity but is it big on features? 05 Mar 2004All MP3 Players




