Rio Volt SP150 Personal CD Player

I bought the player after a lot of research (not enough it turned out) for two purposes:
1) to listen to audio books in the car
2) to listen to MP3 music mix CDs
A friend of mine had bought one of Rio's earlier models, the SP100, for listening to audio books in the car, and had been pleased with it.
For audio books, one feature is absolutely key: the "resume" feature. If your CD player doesn't have it, you need to have a pen and pad of paper to write down where you were at before you stopped it, and then spend 20 seconds getting back to that point when you start back up. A real pain, and one I was looking forward to leaving behind with this player. Unfortunately, Rio inexplicably decided to backslide on the design of this product. While the SP150 does have a "resume" feature, it rewinds to the start of the track when you restart. Given that tracks in audio books are frequently over 20 minutes long, the resume feature isn't useful if implemented this way, and you're back to the "pad of paper method" described above. While they upgraded the resume feature through firmware on the SP100, they have offered no such upgrades on the SP150. I contacted Rio customer service to see if I'd overlooked something, but was told, "sorry, that's the way it is". (By the way, they took about a day to get back to me by e-mail - acceptable turn around time in my opinion.) The resume feature described is implemented correctly on the iRiver products, among others, and is a selling point used by many salesmen. Unfortunately, more companies have implemented it the same way Rio has, which is a shame, since it's always easy to get back to the start of the track by pushing just a single button, but it's not nearly as easy to get back to where you left off.

The other application I'd planned to use it for was playing MP3 music discs. I suppose this works well enough as is, but lacks many features offered by other players, such as ways to search for songs. (They claim they have a search feature on the packaging on the back of the box, but it's not true - I encourage you to look at the PDF manual available on their web site to check out the features.) It has a display with 3 lines of text, with a nice backlight. The size of text and the number of characters appears to be about average among players. Many other players only have a couple lines of text. Unfortunately, if you're trying to find a particular song (an average disc can hold about 150 mp3 songs), it only shows the first word or two of the song, and it takes several seconds after starting the song before it starts scrolling, so I was only able to identify less than a third of the songs on the sample disc I used through the display, without waiting a while for the scrolling. If you didn't have a printout of what's on the CD, it would take 20 minutes to go through the songs one at a time to find a particular one you are looking for. So I guess I learned that a search function, or something like the "Navitrack" function of the TDK mojo, might be pretty nice for this application. If you have your disc nicely organized in folders and subfolders, and knew which subfolder your song was in, then you could get around this problem. Unfortunately, much of the software such as iTunes provides a flat file structure when burning the final disc, even if multiple playlists were used to burn the disc.

I didn't try jarring it, but I've heard it's pretty good at avoiding skip. I liked the design. The startup took 10+ seconds to load the code in and read the disc, which seemed slow - but I guess a lot of other players are equally slow. The player is firmware upgradeable, so if new formats like Ogg Vorbis take off, they can add the capabilities to the player. This separates it from the $40 players which otherwise have very similar functionality. Rio was very active at providing firmware upgrades earlier, with 6 being provided for the SP100, but none for the SP150 or SP350. I wish they'd included some of the enhancements on this player. iRiver, who makes the player for them in South Korea, has a similar product line, with similar part numbers.
I also looked at the SP350, which has the following differences: slimmer package, larger memory for longer "no skip" time, includes rechargable batteries and a battery charger if you're plugged into the the AC adapter. I believe the SP350 also includes a car adapter, that plugs into your cigarette lighter - a nice extra. The SP350 has a remote, and unlike the SP150, also includes MP3 management software for the Mac and Windows. On the whole, I think the extras on the SP350 are worth it for a lot of people - I probably would have bought it if they had offered the same refund offer on it. Unfortunately, I probably would have returned it, as I did with the SP150, since it has the same limitations and functions the same way as the SP150.
I am now considering buying a used SP100 from a friend. If buying new, I'd look at the iRiver 150, or the TDK Mojo 620, depending on the application I was going to use it for.