Kingston K-PEX Portable Media Player (2GB)

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/0,39029995,49282758,00.htm

Reviewed 23 August 2006

Reviewed by James Kim

It's no surprise to see Kingston enter the MP3 market with its K-PEX portable media player. After all, fellow memory giants Lexar and, more prominently, SanDisk have been in the MP3 loop for a while now. The K-PEX, available in 1GB (£80) and 2GB (£110) capacities, offers tonnes of features at a decent price. Where the K-PEX falls short (mainly in build quality and video support), it makes it up in its ease of use.

Design
The K-PEX (short for Kingston Personal Entertainment eXperience) looks like a miniature gaming device with controller buttons on either side of the bright and colourful 220x176-pixel, 51mm (2-inch) display -- in fact, it comes with two decent games. It's used oriented horizontally rather than vertically. The unit's budget build quality actually adds to its charm, as it's still durable enough to bang around.

While it's not small for a flash-based device (94 by 46 by 15mm; 65g), it seems small due to its gaming form factor -- it makes the 20GB Archos Gmini 402 look less than mini. The K-PEX is certainly pocketable, though the placement of the headphone jack on top extends its width.

The 2GB Kingston K-PEX next to a 4GB iPod nano

The intuitive K-PEX interface is anchored by the four tactile controller buttons on the left with the Select, Escape and Play buttons prominently on the right side. A Menu button sits above the four-way, with Power down below. The colourful animated icon-driven main menu is made up of individual pages including Music, File Manager, Game, FM Radio, Record, Video, Text, Photo, USB Host and Settings, and can be rifled through easily. Under some menu options such as Music, FM, Record and Settings, more context-sensitive options, such as User EQ (equaliser) and play speed, spill below. Even complete technophobes will be able to pick the K-PEX up and start using it.

You'll find more buttons, such as the dedicated volume buttons and the hold switch on the bottom, and the Mode, Repeat and Record buttons on top. Since these buttons are mostly secondary, they don't get in the way, though they are useful when you learn their functions. For example, in music playback mode, hitting Mode will activate the equaliser, which includes Jazz, Pop, Classic, Pop, 3D and a five-band custom user equaliser. Holding Mode switches between two cool audio-level graphics that pulsate to the beat. In addition, we rarely used the volume buttons, since you can also control volume using the Up and Down controllers.

The K-PEX's many buttons are easy to figure out

On the K-PEX's left spine is the USB port. Unfortunately, it's a nonstandard port, so you can't just use any old cable. More positive is the miniSD slot on the right spine, where you can expand the K-PEX's capacity to up to 1GB. Bundled with the player are earbuds, a nonstandard USB cable, a USB host cable, a rubbery protective case, and a software CD.

The K-PEX's bundled accessories: the K-PEX is sheathed in its rubber case

An expansion card slot is always a plus. The K-PEX has a miniSD card slot

The K-PEX user interface has a notably old-school feel that reminds us of earlier Archos products -- you can even change the font to one of 12 Windows 3.1-style colours. The playback screen is packed with file and setting info and ID3 tag info scrolls across the screen. One should note that this UMS device is folder based (ideal for those who can neatly organise their music), so you can't browse for tracks by song or album.

Features
The K-PEX can do almost anything. It can play back MP3, protected WMA (but not subscription), OGG and WAV audio files. It can play back video as well as photos with background music. It's a USB host, so you can offload images from a digital camera, it can be used as a text viewer, it has an FM tuner, it's a line-in and voice recorder, and finally, it plays games. The device even has a built-in mono speaker located on the back.

What it can't do is record video and record from FM. In addition, you must use the bundled software, which supports AVI, MPEG-1 and -2 and WMV, to transcode any video file so that it works on the player. Still, this USB mass-storage device packs plenty of power into a small space.

Performance
Performance is mostly positive. Bootup time is lengthy (30 seconds), though system navigation is mostly hiccup free. We did notice an audible pop when we backed out of the playback screen into the current music folder, and we did notice a firmware bug that skips you to the next track when you press the reverse button (hitting reverse again will take you where you wanted).

Photos and video look nice on the TFT display, though larger photos will take a bit of time to render on the screen. Though you won't get thumbnail views, there is a standard slide-show mode. The Windows-only Kingston MPEG transcoder software is a lightweight drag-and-drop utility that works well enough. Transcoded files have the .mpx extension. Our collection of unprotected WMVs worked fine, though we had trouble with one of our standard AVI files.

We're pretty pleased with the sound quality, which was comparable to our Creative Zen Vision:M. We're also fans of the real-time equalisers. The included earphones aren't shabby, either. Battery life is rated for 17 hours per charge playing audio.

Additional editing by Nick Hide