Transcend T.sonic 610

Most of you will probably not read this because it’s not an iPod, but those of you who aren’t fruit-crazy may want to know what we have to say about the Transcend T.sonic 610 digital audio player. Also, those of you who want to know why we reviewed the T.sonic 610 instead of the T.sonic 620, read on.

As far as specifications go, the T.sonic 610 is quite a regular MP3 player with its 512MB/1GB/2GB capacities, MP3/WMA/WAV playback support, FM radio tuner, digital voice recorder (in MP3 format), USB pen drive (drag and drop) support, etc. It plays only unprotected/ripped WMA files, i.e. not the ones with DRM protection, purchased online. Digital recording is adequate, with looping functions and high/low quality encoding settings. There’s no line in, but that’s alright as this is just a voice recorder.

One of the few things that separates this from the rest of the players is its bright, 1-inch, 2-color OLED display that’s quite informative. The 128x64 display manages to show you the name of the artist, album, track, time elapsed, total time, track number, total track count, volume, EQ setting, playback setting, battery level and finally the soft key options. Not many other players show all this info in a manner as clear and legible as the T.sonic 610. After 10-15 seconds, the screensaver kicks in and scrolls the entire name of the song across the screen in different places, much like the Marquee screensaver in Windows. I like this. The only thing I don’t like about the display is the font. The serif, Times New Roman-like font is a bad choice for a small display and even though the T.sonic 610 display is clear and well laid-out, a sans-serif font like Arial would always work better. Serif fonts work better for printed material. Anyway, enough of the typography 101!

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The T.sonic 610 is a pretty compact audio player that reminds me of the old Nokia 8310, only this at least half the size. It’s 7cm tall, around 3.5cm wide and 1.5cm thick. It is very, very light. At 28 grams, it’s even lighter than it looks, which is a very good thing. It’s almost as light as the iPod shuffle, although its a lot thicker. The form factor of the T.sonic 610 is candy bar shaped, while the T.sonic 620 is more squarish. Not only that, the 620 weighs around 36 grams, which is not a good thing because it requires a AAA battery, adding more weight to it. The T.sonic 610 has a built-in battery that recharges via USB. The battery lasts for at least ten hours on a charge (rated at 14 hours on the box), which works during regular day to day commuting, but not if you’re planning to take it out of town for more than a couple of days. Some of those Sony Walkmans [EDITOR: NOT WALKMEN] do upto 30 hours, if you’re looking to go on a trip.

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Speaking of USB, The player has a mini USB connector on the top next to the headphone jack and it also comes with a tiny adapter that gives you a male full USB plug that fits into your PC’s USB ports. This connector is really tiny, and since the player is ridiculously light, you can stick it into the USB port just like you would a small pen drive. The player is not PlaysForSure compatible, which can be seen as a good thing because that enables drag and drop music updates to the player without requiring Windows Media Player. Even though its a simple drag and drop, the player still manages to read ID3 tags, though browsing is only folder-based. I like this bit a lot.

The T.sonic 610 has a very iPod-like look and feel, which almost every other device out there has these days, including the newly launched Microsoft Zune. It has a four way D-pad for volume up/down and track previous/next or forward/rewind operations. There is no center button for play/pause, which is moved to the left soft key instead. The right soft key invokes the menu. After getting in to the menu, the left soft key changes to an ’enter’ key, but the right one doesn’t let you exit. In this player, the menu is at the top most level and the music/fm etc players are all ‘applications’ in it. So if you go into the menu while listening to music, you need to click ’enter’ on music again to get back to it. Overall, the menu system can get a bit confusing, but its eventually usable. I would have liked the D-pad to be 5-way, having the play/pause button in the center.

As expected, the bundled headphones don’t do justice to the actual output quality of the T.sonic 610, which is not too bad. It lacks the requisite depth and ‘bass’ if you want to call it that, i.e., it doesn’t sound as good as an iPod Shuffle or Nano. I wouldn’t go far as to call it “good” sound quality, but “decent” would probably be appropriate. It doesn’t sound as bad as some of those 800-buck VCD players you get on the streets these days. The T.sonic 610 does come with a 5-band equalizer, but instead of tweaking the sound in the right bands, it just makes it louder. Almost every band I adjust only made it sound louder or softer.

You can pick up the Transcend T.sonic 610 for as low as Rs. 4,350 for the 2GB version, with the 1GB version coming in for around 800-1,000 bucks less. This is not a bad price for a digital audio player of this size with a display and all that, but the department in which it doesn’t perform up to the mark—is the sound quality—obviously the most important part. So if you’re looking for a feature packed player with decent sound quality, the T.sonic 610 is a good buy, but if sound quality is more important to you, get a MobiBLU or even an iPod Shuffle instead.