All dressed up with little to show

Month Reviewed: April 2005
Verdict: 4
URL: www.olympusamerica.com

The Olympus m:robe MR-500i appeals to your biological instincts so brazenly that it’s downright smutty. Think iPod with breast implants. Gaze longingly at the smooth finish. Ogle the luscious touch screen. Before you know it, this digital siren will have slipped your credit card right out of your wallet.

But then you’ll wake up the next morning and discover you’ve been seduced into dropping 500 bucks on a hag of an MP3 player, digital camera, and handheld photo viewer. The 3.7-inch touch screen is a clever innovation, to be sure. It delivers superb image quality, second only to the Epson P-2000, and it controls every function except for Power and Hold. Digital photographs look vivid and utterly exciting; unless you shot them with the MR-500i itself.

Because the MR-500i is nearly devoid of buttons, you must push on the touch screen to snap a photo, and that action invariably jiggles the camera’s flush-mounted, fixed focal-length lens and 1.2-megapixel image sensor. We found it nearly impossible to capture a clear image; a problem compounded by the absence a flash. Although the device sports a 20GB hard drive, it doesn’t offer a memory-card slot, rendering it a poor companion for photographers using dedicated digital cameras.

The MR-500i fares better as an MP3 player, delivering sound quality rivaling the LCD’s image quality. But it doesn’t get as loud as Creative’s players, it’s much slower than the iPod at scanning and spinning up, and we got less than seven hours of playtime before the rechargeable lithium-polymer battery pooped out.

In fact, the list of things this player can’t do seems longer than the list of things it can: It won’t play video files. There’s no video-out jack for displaying your slide shows on a monitor or television. You can’t load the player through Windows Explorer. Once you’ve set up the player on one PC, you can’t manage it from any other. And although the player supports both MP3 and WMA files, the accompanying PC software will convert CD audio only to WMA format.

On the other hand, that screen really is beautiful. And in Remix mode, you can produce an A/V-club slide show of your digital photos accompanied by your favorite tunes. Considering, however, that even medical marijuana is illegal in the U.S., we’re not sure why you’d want to zone out listening to music and watching a tiny slide show for hours on end. --Logan Decker

+ Disrobed: Fantastic touch screen that looks great, and a foxy cradle.

- Defrocked: Spirit-crushing camera. Poor battery life. Wildly expensive.

COMMENTS:

0

TAGS: 

Comments Print Email