Review: MaxMovie media player

The MaxMovie is billed as a multicodec music player, with 1024 MB of memory. Don't be alarmed - to normal people, that's a 1GB MP3 and media player. Which is what they should have said in the first place.

Its main point is the number of formats it accepts, the size and the added extras it comes with. As with most added extras, they range from the useful to the truly useless - we all know that the need to record radio was only useful in the olden days, when we sat around recording the Top 40 on a Sunday. Still, it's there if you need it in the MaxMovie.

When you take the MaxMovie from the box, the first thing you notice is the size. Out of a fairly bulky box emerges something that's small enough to get lost amongst all the paraphernalia you get with it. It's only a little larger than a box of matches. It's very light, which explains why it comes with a belt clip and arm band for active types. Whilst not supported by the likes of Nike+, it is smaller and lighter than the iPod Nano, making it extra-suitable for exercise should you be inclined. I did find someone who was inclined, and they immediately pointed out that although there is an armband supplied, there doesn't seem to be any way of fixing the player to the armband apart from wedging it under the strap. However, on the upside, this meant we discovered this meant it was robust enough to be chucked about a gym a fair amount - every cloud has a silver lining.

Adding files to the player is a simple case of dragging them and dropping them into the removable drive that shows up in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder (it is Mac compatible).  It's possible to transfer music as WMA both DRM protected and not, MP3 files, whilst video support is from MP4 and DivX, and finally you can load JPG and AVI files. Phew.

With the positives of being compact, come the negatives. The screen is just 1" square, so there is absolutely no point in trying to look at photos or video clips on it - it's just too small.  It also means that the user interface is, to put it lightly, a nightmare. There are two few buttons doing too many things, all of which they try to show on the screen (see the picture to the left).

The buttons were unresponsive -  it was really difficult to get the player to pause voice recording, despite jabbing at the play/pause button several times. It also turned up default set to German. Navigating to the Settings/language/ English version took all my secondary school knowledge and then some.

Bizarrely, the packaging says that the player is compatible with "all major music stores like musicload and AOL". There's an obvious point here about its incompatibility with iTunes - I can't figure out if they've got away with it by not including a comma, but either way it's pretty misleading.

When the MaxMovie first appeared, I really liked the size and weight, as well as the non-fussy design. Even loading it with media was pain free. However, when I came to actually use this in the way God intended I completely fell out of love  (or lust as I now realise it was). It's just too small to work - there are too many functions available from too few buttons, and most of the functions aren't effective on the player anyway, unless you have a particular love of 1" square photos. For £150 it's a little more than a fairly pricey USB drive.