Foehn & Hirsch X19 4GB MP3 Player Review – 70 Hour Battery Life
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Product Blurb:
Foehn & Hirsch X19 4GB MP3 Player 1.0 inch OLED Screen Metallic Grey
The new Foehn & Hirsch MP3 Players are bang up to date, trendy, stylish and modern design, they are of outstanding quality in design and build. They are beautifully finished and packaged.
The X19 is very portable and slips easily into a pocket or purse. It looks the part and is a must for those who love their music!
Features:
- 1.0 inch OLED Screen 128×64 (blue text, highly readable and well thought out)
- Built in MIC (you can record from the radio as well)
- 70-hour-long time playing
- 3-4 Charge (it says 3 minutes, but that’s a translation issue)
- 99db high quanlity sound
- Suport FM function (has a radio, which actually works, can save presets)
- Built in 360mAh lithium battery
- Size:69.9 x 27.9 x 11.2mm
- Weight:80g
Costs £26.07 excluding VAT, at the time of writing this you can get it delivered for £32.57 with a 5 day super saver from ebuyer.com, click here.
BRIEF HISTORY – of my MP3 players to date.
When I buy something, I expect it to be designed and built to fulfil a purpose. When I want to listen to music, I find MP3’s extremely convenient to use, I always have, since the beginning when iPods were none existent.
I was one of the pioneers who used to burn MP3’s (that I owned the rights to of course) onto CDR’s in raw format to use in my cars Headunit (it was one of the first Blaupunkt models). Of course, it’s all mainstream now, docking ports for your iPOD or FM Transmitters to play them through your radio.
My first portable player was a pioneer MP3 CD player I used to walk around with, at the time, flash memory wasn’t mainstream or cheap, so the market wasn’t inundated with mass produced rubbish, only fit for a Christmas cracker.
Anyways, the iPOD came out, and I always felt it’s price was premium, and you were just paying for a brand name, so I never got one, and in fact. I had one of the first MP3 player phones, a Nokia 6230, fantastic featured phone, it might not of been the first, but it was one of the phones that almost did everything you could ask of it. I’ve still got it in a box upstairs, it still works, built like a tank, and small to boot…anyway I’m not reviewing phones or other products, my point is, I’ve always managed to avoid mainstream brand name products when it comes to MP3’s, and I’m proud of it.
Recently though, I’ve had the urge to find a simple MP3 player, with an extremely long battery life, now, looking at the iPODS, most of them have rubbish battery lifes, I don’t consider 30 hours decent for something costing £100’s.
But last week I came across some new products on ebuyer, they’re selling players made by Foehn & Hirsch, which is a name I’ve never heard of, but I noticed they are claiming 70 hour battery life!
Yes, 70 hours battery life, and it costs less than £30, I was sold.
Finally someone released a product which is affordable, is designed to play MP3’s (not be a mobile computer! if I want that, I’ll bring a laptop) and lasts more than 3 hours (I had a Veho Sports Rechargeable, which was crap as one side of it is touch sensitive, when ever I breathed it would change tracks, absolutely awful, or worse it would deafen me by increasing the volume up to full whack when the battery got low, seems the buttons don’t respond well to low voltage).
PACKAGING and FIRST IMPRESSIONS
First impressions, nice! For the money, it has above average packaging, nice matt colouring. The inside has a couple of compartments, and the player sits neatly in a foam mould. Not much plastic, which is always a bonus, as recycling is an important part of modern society, nice to see companies steering away from vacuum sealed packaging.
THE MANUAL
The manual isn’t bad at all, my only criticism is it might be hard to read with bad eyesight. Some diehard mp3philles might say there’s not enough text, but I think it has everything you need to know. Let’s face it, it’s not rocket science to copy MP3’s onto the player (just drag and drop files) or to turn it on. I’ve scanned and attached a copy of the manual if you’re interested, you can see how simple it is.
THE HEADPHONES and SOUND QUALITY
Unfortunately like every budget player, the headphones are below average, the sound quality is below average, they are high in treble, and lack volume, even on setting 31, and they don’t sound loud. Maybe this is a passive effort to reduce battery consumption on the claimed 70 hours. If I didn’t have better headphones, I think I could put up with them though, they are quite comfortable despite lacking foam pads. (note the equalizer makes little difference in the sound output if the headphones are unable to reproduce certain bands of frequency, so it’s not what equalizer setting you have I’m afraid).
I would highly recommend purchasing something with better dynamic range you could spend more than the player on decent headphones, but I would guess that most manufacturers know people budget for headphones on top of their player.
I’ve tested the player with some £100 Grado Labs Headphones, and I must say the player produces clean audio, and reproduces above average sound quality, if however you use the player on top volume setting I’m not convinced the amplifier is producing an entirely uniform signal, but then, these headphones have large drivers, I’m surprised they didn’t kill the player, but I did notice the battery life was reduced, I’ll edit this post when I know exact measurements once the battery has worn in.
THE PLAYER
It’s small and a little above average in build quality, but considering its size and entirely plastic, I’m satisfied with it. The screen is cool, it’s kind of retro, and in my opinion easy to read.
I would say it’s very easy to use, there’s not many buttons, and you easily work out the functions if you’ve used any kind of player (vhs, tv remote etc).
The M button (or E if you press it while look at the screen in a horizontal orientation) is fairly self explanatory, press it and use the arrow buttons to change to different functions (radio, browser, settings), the Menu button also acts as the OK/Select button while in the menu.
Speed, it’s slow the first time you turn it on, it indexes all the files, I’m assuming it reads ID3 tags, as the the music folder organizes tracks by artists, genres etc. Once it’s made the index file, the next time you turn it on, it’s within 5s, which is pretty nice.
DATA TRANSFER
I’m testing this on a Windows box, you literally plug the usb cable in, and the folder pops up. I had no problems using it, went to my mp3 folder, and dropped 1.5Gb of songs onto the player, the transfer rate is pretty good, usually manages a couple of songs a second depending on their size. I’ve had far worse transfer rates from other devices. You can’t play anything while transferring songs, but that’s pretty typical.
THE MENU
The main menu has these main categories:
- Music
- Record (voice recorder)
- Voice
- Record using Built In Microphone
- Record from the Radio
- FM
- Listen to a Station
- Visual Tuning Bar (manual or automatic)
- Save, Use or Delete Presets
- Ebook (not worked this out yet, probably plays txt files or something like that).o
- Settings
- Equaliser
- Play Mode
- Normal
- Repeat One
- Repeat All
- Random
- Screen Off (can choose how long the screen turns off, saves battery life)
- Auto Shutdown (if music isn’t playing it will turn itself off after this period)
- Language (supports English, Chinese and Russian…nifty)
- Storage Info (how much of the memory is used, tracks etc, I’ve got 1500Mb of MP3’s on here for testing)
- Default (resets the player to default settings)
- Browse
- You can browse folders on the memory card, so if you drop folders of music (like an artist), you can scroll to a specific artist.
- Seperate Folders are listed for Recordings, you can access them here.
- Now Playing (this takes you back to the player screen, where you can see info about the current song being played).
THE RADIO
It actually works okay, I can pick up a signal in my room, even though I live in the country and in a valley. There’s a little bit of hiss, but if I was in a strong reception area, I have no doubts you would get a clean signal.
Plus, you have the option to save, use and delete presets, so you don’t have to manually find a station, or wait for the automatic tuner to do it for you.
And you can save the radio show to a WAVE file, I’m not sure on the bitrate, but even though I’m using ½ of the memory, it’s still showing that I can record for 15 hours, not bad imo.
CONCLUSION
I’m more than happy with it, it cost £32 roughly including a 5 day delivery saver, it seems ebuyer don’t hurray this any more, as it actually took 6 days, gone are the days where I’d choose 5 day and it would turn up the next day, but still one of my favourite online shops.
You can get one from ebuyer using this link – click here.
THE PLAYER = 8/10
THE HEADPHONES = 4/10
Solid MP3 player, with a decent battery life, it does what it says on the box!
December 31st, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Good review.
What I’d like to know is whether this product really reads the ID3 tags in the mp3 files (i.e. artist / album / title info). It has a “browse by folder” function, but does that require a physical folder structure reflecting the album / artist? What if you just dump a load of mixed mp3s all together in the same folder on the player — will you be able to browse by album etc then?
Another question: it displays the file name (e.g. “10 – Whisper.mp3″) but does it display the actual underlying title / artist / album info embedded as ID3 tags in the mp3s?
Thanks!
April 2nd, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Unfortunately it does not, mine also died recently for no apparent reason, the battery was still going strong, I’d charge it about once a week.
Typically I’d copy songs over to my player as and when I wanted them, and I’d just listen to them one after another, so I never found the lack of an ID3 tag a problem, additionally 90% of my music is titled correctly so I never had a problem. I admit, it would be nice, but I think it would take far too long to read the ID3 info.
I was more concerned with battery life, which this unit delivered in full.