[haertig]

You asked for reports on the AGPTEK players. I'll give you info on my Ruizu player that was just delivered today,since I don't have an AGPTEK one. Looking at the pictures of these players on Amazon, my hunch is that they are all the same generic Chinese offerings, just with different brand names attached to them. By their looks anyway. I don't know if they really are the same players of not however.

OK, for the Ruizu X26 player: It is cheap. Both in cost and in construction. It is nowhere near the construction quality of my old Sansa Clip and Fuse players. It feels very loose and flimsy. The manual is basically "Press difernt bootons to make change to oparatiion". Thankfully, the menus default to English, so there is that going in your favor. Once you figure out that the Chinese like to use left and right buttons to move up and down in the menus you're halfway home. The second half of the way home is to learn that sometimes to select an option you should hit the "select" button, and other times you should hit the "menu" button. OK, got it. Randomness rules. How often are you going to want to use those silly buttons anyway?

Next, you should devise an escape plan in case something unexpected happens. Sometimes you will be holding a button down, say, to advance forward a few seconds in an audiobook. Admire the skill of the software programmer as you watch the time advance in fits and bursts, sometimes at a rate of 1 second per 3 seconds of button push, sometimes at a rate of 5 minutes per 2 millisecond button push. They must have used advanced algorithms to be able to predict that when you let up on the button you really didn't mean to, so it keeps on advancing without the bother of you having to instruct it to. Your initial reaction might be to hurriedly press the advance button again in some futile attempt to cancel the fast forward, but don't do that. You will get thrown into some other file with that move. The correct technique is to push and hold the button. That works pretty well, sometimes. I guess you are supposed to confuse the device with your actions just like it confuses you with its decisions - you work out some kind of uneasy truce that way. If they could manage to harness the aura of this device, I think they have invented a nearly perfect platform for generating randomness, say for crypto applications and such.

BTW, I am learning celestial navigation - you know, astronomical bodies, with a sextant, on a ship, calculating with sight reduction tables, etc. - and that is way easier than navigating this device.

But I got it. I copied over the same audiobook that I am currently listening to on my Sansa Clip. Took a while to transfer. They must be using USB 0.00001beta. Started listening and thought, "What, did they change the narrator?" Nope, it's just that the supplied ear bugs are slightly worse sounding than two tin cans with a string stretched between them.

Next up was experimenting with having it remember my place in the audiobook. Any normal person would not be able to figure this out. Because you can't use the on/off switch (that makes it forget). But a thought stored in the back of my brain, probably something I read here on these forums, told me to push and hold the play button to turn it off. Hey! That made the thing count to three - right there on the screen - and say "bye". And lo and behold, it remembered where I was when I turned it back on!

Now that I've listed all the positives of this little MP3 player, let's get on to the negatives. Oh nevermind. You've probably already got the picture. If your eyesight has gone downhill as you age, like mine, and audiobooks are now what you use, if you find yourself in the situation where this MP3 player is the only thing available - skip it, and learn Braille instead.

This device would be about an 1/2 by 1 MOA target at 200 yards, and I think that's what I'll probably end up using it for. Six dollars and sixty one cents down the drain. Oh well, ... "Sansa Clip - please don't ever die!"