On Thursday I bought a $99 (discounted from $199) MP4 player from Aldi (a German supermarket chain that has recently opened up here). The player is a Tevion model M6.
By a long way it’s the cheapest and nastiest piece of consumer electronics that I have ever owned. It has very flimsy construction (feels like it will crumple in my pocket – not like a solid iRiver) and poor design all around. The viewing angle of the LCD screen is very small, so if I hold it close to my face then the viewing angle will be wrong for at least one eye. There are two power switches, an electronic one on the top (which is also sometimes used as an escape key for menus that don’t recognise the key labelled as ESC) and a slide switch at the side. When I use the electronic switch to turn the power off the back-light will usually flicker – I guess that they wanted to have an electronic switch and then put a mechanical switch in the design when they couldn’t get it working.
The menus are strange, they have a game menu that only has Tetris – why not have a Tetris menu instead?
The FM radio function doesn’t seem to work and the option to select a European frequency range is lost when the power is cut, along with all saved station frequencies.
I never got around to testing the voice-recording function (one of the reasons for purchasing the device) as it failed in too many other ways.
The device has an AVI of Barbie Girl by Aqua and also a MP3 with a text file that has the lyrics for Karaoke, this is probably the only good feature of the device. Unfortunately it appears to have some sort of DRM as it gave a padlock icon and stopped working after I played it a few times (fortunately it’s unable to store settings so a power cycle solved that problem).
When I connected it to my PC via USB it showed two devices, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. /dev/sdb gave an IO error (apparently due to not having an SD memory card installed) and and /dev/sda was not in any format recognised by file -s /dev/sda.
I’m going to have to return this, even $99 is too much for a device of such quality. Maybe I’ll buy an iRiver to do this if they sell one without DRM.
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Try the iAudio devices. No DRM and they work very good.
My son has been having problems with DRM – I’m not up on these things, What is DRM, what does it do, how do you overcome it.
CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME?
DRM is Digital Rights Management AKA Digital Restriction management. It’s purpose is to make your computer or other electronic device not act on your behalf but instead act on behalf of someone in Hollywood – often preventing you from performing legal actions. It’s best to just avoid purchasing any device or program that has DRM whenever possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
See the above URL for more information.
The radio does not work!!!!!!!!!
It doesn’t have a radio. It has an FM transmitter. Turn a radio on, tune it to an fm freq that has nothing on it, adjust the Tevion mp4 player’s frequency to the same frequaency, and HEY PRESTO! The music comes out of your radio! Instant speakers. It takes a bit of fiddling to get a decent spare frequency, but IT DOES WORK!
Hi, bought Tevion MP4 player from Aldi, Scotland. Another piece of over-complicated music player that is mean to be simple. It is far from user-friendly and the quality of electrical connections is flimsy as it keeps disconnecting itself and it keeps swopping between being an MP4 and a USB device. During the download phase it refuses to let the computer connect with it generating only a pop-up message telling me that my MP£ devcie is not connected!
Even for £25 it’s not worth the extreme level of hassel and I can’t possible expect my daughter to have to put up with the complicated download porcedure when my older daughter has plug ‘n play with her iPod.
aye, Andy
hey, i have a tevion mp4 – player model no: M6.
i converted a video file to avi but it still says file format error. wat do i do?
Avi wrong, MP4 right
the model what i have only supports an .amv format which may be an answer to some people
NOTE: According to my virus scanner (avast)MY Tevion MP4 player had 2 trojans on it and so did the other 2 I bought for my family.
Other than that I like them. Transmitter option is great for listening all round the house on our various radios and is great for pranking stores that pump radio into them!
no Caroline
this is for a m6, so yeh your statement doesnt fit.
i found the problem though,
go up to top of the avi format changer and chage it 2 2:4 or 4:2 ( cant remember which 1) ;D.
email if u need help
bennyboy_48@hotmail.com
hahahah john
does it have a transmiter?
so can u change the station from a base raido on the mp4 or does it only play the same music as the base radio?
I bought mine last week , converting and watching videos no problem , music transfers are again no problem.
Probably not as user friendly as Ipod but there again , not in same price range.
For the cost I am perfectly happy , if you want an Ipod buy an Ipod..
It’s the only compact music playing device with digital voice recording that I could find. Excellent at the price.
Pity it uses a Microsoft product with such a daft method of paying for a download though! (Aimed at those too young for credit cards I suppose.)
well i dont know what ulot are going on about at frist i had a bit of problem putting music on but if you go into the settings on the menu and press online mode then go ont media it will alow you to put music and any other stuff u want personally i love my mp4 player as it is just like an ipod at £30 i say its a bargain
so please ppl use ur commen sense or stick to the old walkman cd players if u dont know how to work em