Zlaxfish Network

This is a review I wrote two years ago but I figured I would transfer it here…

Recently, my 3rd generation iPod has been acting
finicky and it seemed the hard drive was dying. I had
been looking at the 5th generation iPod as a possible
replacement until I came across the Pontis MX2020, a
PMP with a bigger screen and for $100 less than the
iPod! It’s 20gb, with a 3.5″ touchscreen, and A/V
inputs and outputs for playing/recording from a TV or
other source. I read a review on osnews.com and I was
intrigued by the fact that it runs on Linux. $200
later, I had it in my hands and I began to play around
with it. You navigate primarily through the joystick
which is pretty responsive and felt surprisingly good
in my hand.

In terms of video, it supports a plethora of formats
including MPEG2, DivX 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, ASF, AVI, Xvid,
and some MPEG 4. Playback was for the most part, quite
smooth and enjoyable, although the screen did have
visible lines that almost made it look interlaced.
Overall though, it was quite enjoyable and usable.

However, the reason I bought this, was as a replacement
for my iPod. Alas, the audio side of things were
atrocious. Sure, the playback quality was good, but
that’s about as far as it went. Overall, including the
audio section, navigation is quite laggy, which with
time, may be forgivable. However, while playing songs,
to skip to the next track, it takes 4 seconds from when
you hit next for it to stop playing the current song,
and then an average of 6-8 seconds for it to load the
next song. For someone who’s used to quickly shuffling
and skipping through their music, this was a major
dealbreaker.

The player shows up on your computer as a removable
hard drive, so as you may expect, you must organize the
music yourself. However, once the music is on the
player, you can only play sequentially through a
folder, you cannot play multiple folders at once, nor
does it get organized by ID3. Even more frustrating is
while playing a song, you cannot get back to your music
to pick something else. With a firmware update, this is
enabled, but it only allows you to get to the folder
you’re already playing in, which you can just fast
forward to anyway!

Overall, if you want a way to carry your videos around
with you and use it to record, the MX2020 is up to the
task. However if you intend on using it as an mp3
player at all, avoid it at all costs.