Mitashi MPS 1002

I’m sure I won’t be singled out if I say that I get annoyed by people playing music on speakers from their phones in public places like restaurants. Somehow portable music player manufacturers are trying to make a trend of playing music in public look cool, by releasing MP3 players with built-in speakers. Samsung did it recently with their K5, but other lesser known brands (like YES) have been doing it for years. The latest to join in is Mitashi, with its MPS 1002 portable MP3 player.

Like most speaker-packing MP3 players, the MPS 1002 is quite thick. It’s still quite compact overall, coming close to the shape of the Transcend T.sonic 610. It’s very light, inspite of being so chunky. It comes in a very familiar white and even proudly displays ‘1GB’ on the rear in a fashion very similar to another popular portable audio player.

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It has a 1-inch, two-color OLED display that shows you most of what you need to know. Thankfully, they didn’t include a video playback feature in the device on such a small screen. The device plays back MP3 and WMA files.

The interface is once again the same one found on other Mitashi and Transcend players. The main menu has icons to all the features, i.e. music playback, FM radio, voice recorder etc.

The buttons to interact with the UI are on the top which aren’t too convenient since they’re flush with the casing. You will end up turning the device over every time you need to perform any action.

The stereo speakers are on both sides of the screen. They sound surprisingly good for such a tiny device and are also quite loud. Naturally they don’t have any form of low frequency reproduction (no bass) but the quality and clarity is as good as you’d need it. At full volume too, it didn’t distort. I kept it on the dashboard in my car with the windows rolled up. It sounded nice, though there was no thump that I’m used to. It actually sounded better than the loudspeakers in most phones.
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The earphones provided with the set are not too good. They’re large and uncomfortable. The playback quality through my Fontopia earphones was pretty good. Not amongst the best I’ve heard, of course, but good enough to be called good. Good enough to recommend. You don’t actually need to get Fontopia-like earphones – even a basic pair of Panasonic headphones (that cost around Rs. 400) will do.

The player does have EQ preset options, but as usual they don’t really change the sound as much as expected. You’ll probably just notice a difference in the high frequency output. There is no user customizable equalizer.

It connects to your PC or Mac via USB 2.0. The transfer rate was quite slow - It took approximately 20 minutes to transfer a 950MB file to the player. It is a standard USB Mass Storage compliant device – just drag and drop.

Battery life of the device is fair. A combination of speakers and earphones lasted around 5-6 hours on average, give or take a few. The player recharges via USB. A cable is included and so is an AC charger cable, which can be used to charge any USB device.

A price of Rs. 4,390/- for the Mitashi MPS 1002 is high. It’s a decent quality MP3 player with speakers and it also has acceptable battery life, but the price is too high. You may get it off the street for around Rs. 3,500 or so, but that’s still a little high. If it were to cost around Rs. 3,000, I’d recommend this.