Product Review: Nextar T30 Portable Media Player

The Nextar T30 portable media player, despite its inexpensive price tag, is hard to recommend when put up against other devices similar to it. It has a few stand out qualities, but the overall experience it provides is marred by a small host of mostly minor issues. Were there but a handful of these it would be one thing, but it is hard to overlook so many challenges at the same time. Should you choose to purchase this player, it is best suited for those on a budget who want a portable media player which offers a wide range of mostly functional features.

The Nextar T30 portable media player, about the size of a deck of cards, is not an overly attractive device. It feels light in the hand and pretty durable. The 3.5-inch TFT color display is pretty typical, smudging easily. Eight control buttons line the player's sides, including a power button which annoyingly must be held down for several seconds to start the device.

Feature navigation, handled by the external buttons, is confusing because of the need for constant jumping between different sides of the player. This player is fully featured, with a wide array of customizable control options available. Digital media files are loaded through Windows Media Player or by dropping and dragging files through Windows.

Music audio quality was good through the included earphones, though minor distortion existed at higher volume levels. A built-in speaker sounded mono in nature, though it put out decent audio. Controls for customizing audio would be better off being integrated under the audio function as opposed to requiring users to jump around to the settings function.

Video playback was somewhat disappointing, being a little grainy and with some washed out colors. One can also only playback AVI video at a specific resolution, which limits what can be watched unless one does file conversion.

Digital pictures, FM radio and voice recording all worked out well. The ebook reading function is pretty useless as only simple text files can be viewed. On the upside, both start up and battery charge times on this player are impressive.

Also of note is the fact the T30 can be used to store other types of files besides digital media. That being said, transfer times of files over the USB 2.0 connection was slow compared to similar devices.