Pine Technology SM200C Personal CD Player

Skip the Pine D?Music SM200-C. There are problems abound with this unit and they are all fixed in the new generation of MP3CD players. I bought the SM200-C because at the time it was the only player on the market that supported ID3 Tags in MP3 files ? a necessity if you are going to be scrolling through 150-200 songs on one CD. The unit itself, superficially, looks ugly ? it looks much like a pre-production prototype unit. But, looks can be overlooked if the underlying hardware is good. To that point Pine also fails. The biggest problem that plagues the SM200-C is the battery life. Using the rechargeable batteries the unit got only 3.5 hours of playtime for me. Using alkaline batteries I got an even worse 2.5 hours of playtime out of the unit. This is ridiculous. Now these figures are for when I just listened to a CD without skipping around much. I got less time when I did do some searching. The second big problem with the SM200-C is that it sounds terrible and skips on certain MP3 files that would play well on the computer. The unit sounds tinny and even though it has a few EQ settings, those don?t help much and do nothing really. The player skipped badly on some MP3 files that played well on my computer. And it was a consistent problem. These two problems cripple the SM200-C, which at this point is 1st generation hardware and there is no reason to pick this machine up. Maybe if the firmware of the machine was upgradeable then the problems could be ironed out and features could be added, but it is not upgradeable. Instead of the SM200-C take a look at the SONICblue Rio Volt which is a much better MP3CD player with everything that the Pine D?Music SM200-C is missing.