Well today I received my brilliant new Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra 30gb for 299€. The first impressions cannot be better even though I\'ve touched it little, but enough to write a review.
The player comes very well packed indise a plastic box. Inside the box you\'ll also find a nice leather case, a battery, headphones, charger, manual and cd-rom with drives. I\'ve plugged it into the PC and asked me for the drivers. I installed them in 5 mins and began to check the Nomad experience
I must say that the Nomad Organizer is quite good in my opinion. Some people said that the program sucked very much and was impossible to use. So I have to say that after using it 10 mins, the program is easy, fast as hell and very intuitive. It detects the cd-audio you put into your drives and automatically connects with CBBD to bring you the data of the album (artist, tracklists, style....) You can adjust the quality of the MP3, namings, and lot of such stuff.
The encoding is extra fast... it lasts about 1 min in saving the tracks in wav, converting them to mp3 and writing the songs to the player (+ erasing the rucbbish wavs). I must say that it impressed me because in 15 mins or so i had 12 full albums into my nomad. Great.
What about the features of the player? It\'s made up of plastic or sth similar (= very light). The battery is small and is placed inside a door that can be open in the front of the device. It lasted to fully charge about 3 hours...
The quality of the sound is clear, brilliant, and high if I may say. You can\'t hardly distinguish between 128kbs and 192kbs. Very very nice. The headphones are not marvelous but they do their best actually. Menus are intuitive and the organizing function rocks. They are not very very fast but you wont find problems surfing them while listening to songs. A song placed in a different sector of the HD (another album recorded) lasts about 1,5 secs to be found and started to be played (which is not bad for such a tiny hdd).
You cannot use your Nomad meanwhile it is connected to the PC, I mean using the Nomad Organizer. You have to unplug it and the it becomes ready. I cannot tell you about the life of the battery because it hasn\'t finished yet (jejjej). I guess the first charges will last a little less than the later ones.
The case is very very stylish and has the exact room for the player. It also has a switch for your belt.
I\'m very happy with my purchase. It looks really great. The sound is wonderful and the software and overall quality of the product rocks. Not much more to say. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Mike.
