HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

Introduction

The “Datasafe oomi” is basically the “EZAV Pebble”, branded by the folks over at Advanced MP3 Players. Its former name was the “AMP3 Pebble”. It is a Korean product, made in China. Hope all this unnecessary naming history didn’t confuse you.

What makes the Oomi stand apart? It’s one of the smallest MP3 players around. It’s got an FM tuner, FM/voice recorder and a bunch of other minor extras, but is it a device worth your money? Read on for our full review.

Box

A no-frills box that includes:

• the stock buds (as always, you can do better, but if you’re on a low budget these’ll do the work)
• the USB cable for charging/transferring songs
• an adjustable lanyard headphone adapter (so that you can wear the Oomi on your neck)
• and a manual.

Movin’ along…

Form factor

The Oomi is small (4.7×3.2×1.3cm), pocket-friendly and at a mere 20 grams you can keep it hanging around your neck (using only the headphone cable… not a lanyard or anything) and hardly tell it’s there.

Despite its small dimensions it’s relatively easy to manipulate even if you have big hands.

On the front, there’s five buttons (up/down, left/right and center) which give tactile feedback when pressed, and work excellent in general. These controls are gathered together to look like one giant round button, surrounded by a blue LED ring (that is lit up when you connect the Oomi to your computer). When you’re listening to music (or the radio) the ring is blinking. It looked cool at first, but now it’s more of an annoyance—and there seems to be no option to turn it off.

There’s a tiny orb (small button) on each side of the Oomi. Depending on how long these buttons are pressed, they’ve got dual functions; more on that in our “Using the Oomi” section.

The standard (3.5mm) headphone jack is located on the back, near the top; you may have difficulties pairing it with “pro” headphones which generally have cords with thicker ends. It doubles as the USB port, taking a cue from mobiBLU’s DAH-1500—this is a genius implementation, and one we’ll probably witness in more MP3 players to come.

The Oomi feels sturdy and the build quality is solid. The mirrored front is relatively scratch-free—which is a pleasure to see in a world of “look at them and they’ll get scratched” iPods—and is easy to clean.

There’s a metal arc on the top, for use with the lanyard—you could also use it to attach the Oomi to a keyring; but that’s only when there’s no headphones on, otherwise there’s no space.

Screen

The 64×48 pixels OLED screen looks bright and nice with its blue-ish text on black background. It’s “hidden” by the semi-reflective silver mirror front, so when it’s off you can tell whether the device is screen-less or not (as was the case with a friend of mine). So, nice and bright—but that’s when you’re indoors, or outdoors and the sun has set. Because during the day when outdoors, the Oomi is automagically transformed into an iPod shuffle (read: no screen). The product page says that the “reverse OLED screen” is “versatile and viewable in [...] direct sunlight” but this is obviously a joke. Even setting the contrast to “10” (maximum) and moving to a place where there’s shade, it’s near impossible to read the screen; good luck alternating between MP3/FM mode, or changing directories.

Now, as to what’s displayed on the screen, the “Now Playing” one, which is the screen you’ll be looking at most of the time, tries to pack too much information and actually doesn’t do a bad job at it. On the top left, there’s the indication for play mode and normal/A-B repeat mode. On the top right, there’s the battery meter; beneath it, the file bitrate, file counter (e.g. 002/040 means it’s the 2nd file on a total of 40 loaded on the device) and the time remaining for the song to end. On the bottom, you can see the filename/ID3 tag of the current song scrolling in a slightly larger font. (Note that international fonts are sadly not supported, so if you’ve got a file with, say, greek characters it’ll come up blank; no characters, nothing—the same goes for the file’s appearance in the directory tree.) The bitrate and file counter could have been omitted to make things a bit roomier.

Specs and extra features

I shall highlight some of the key features here—a full list of specs sorted alphabetically can be found here.

The device supports MP3/WMA/ASF; -no support for DRM’d WMA files from music stores though- (UPDATE: AMP3 says that the new Oomi branded versions of the product support DRM’d WMA files). It works with both PCs and Macs with the good ol’ drag & drop method (I didn’t bother to install the included software). The Oomi is USB 2.0-capable, which translated to relatively high transfer speeds on our tests.

The FM tuner is really bad—compared to the one that comes with my MuVo TX FM, this thing is a joke. Depending on where you live you’ll either get barely decent reception, or no reception at all. I even had to hold the headphone cord (it acts as the antenna) at a special position while walking outdoors to get it to work. I’ll be clear on this one: don’t count on the FM tuner, unless you’re interested in pairing it with a FM transmitter (for use in the car, etc.) in which case, I’d like to believe it should work…

The Oomi comes with a radio/voice recorder (no line-in encoding though…)—the former should work (you can set the bitrate to anything from 32 to 192kbps), but as we’ve noted above the FM tuner isn’t of much help to start with. The voice recorder does a good job; there’s static but it picks up your voice nicely, though it’s a bit too sensitive; watch out how you’re handling the device when recording or you’ll be hearing unwanted noise. There’s an option to enable AGC (Automatic Gain Control) which adjusts sensitivity according to the volume of the source. For what it’s worth, I think the mic is hidden on the back of the device somewhere along the reset switch. You can set the bitrate for voice recordings to anything from 16 to 160kbps.

Other extras include a stopwatch (you can’t listen to music at the same time though), a sleep timer (the player shuts down after a user-defined time period; ranges from 15 to 120 minutes), a “power off” function (the player shuts down after a user-defined time period—ranges from 1 to 10 minutes—if it’s not playing any music) and a speed control function (70-130%) which is totally useless but good for a few laughs (turns 50 Cent to Mickey Mouse).

Regarding the sleep timer: it’s practically rendered useless by the blinking LED that surrounds the front controls (read about in the “Form factor” section above); you’re trying to sleep while listening to the Oomi, and this LED pulsates, lightning up your room—not my idea of relaxing.

Using the Oomi

You find the music you want to play on the device by browsing through a directory tree. A long push of the left orb brings it up (a short push acts as a “Hold” switch), with the up/down buttons you move inside the current directory, with the left/right buttons you exit/enter directories respectively. There’s also the option to have the player display the ID3 tags when playing a song.

You get your usual selection of play modes (normal/repeat track/repeat folder/repeat all/shuffle folder/shuffle all) and a new—to me—mode called “intro” that plays the first few seconds of each song; I don’t know it it’ll prove particularly useful, but I liked it.

When you’re listening to music, pressing the right orb shortly puts you in A/B repeating mode. If music playback is stopped, the same function launches the voice recorder and begins recording automatically, something which I didn’t enjoy particularly. Press the orb once more and your recording is saved. If you’re listening to the radio, pressing the right orb shortly launches the radio recorder.

Press the right orb a bit longer and you enter the menu. Plenty of options to choose from, and the Oomi engineers tried to make things a bit easier by matching each option with a big icon, but making sense of the menu’s hierarchy takes a bit time; not a big complaint here though.

Since I found myself often activating the voice recorder by mistake, I think the left orbit’s functions should be reversed—i.e. let the menu come up with a short press, and have the recorder launch with a longer press. Isn’t the “menu” pop-up a more neutral path to go after all? The recorder means you’re switching functions—a short press of a side button shouldn’t do that.

Problem with album art, and notes on firmware

The sample I got had the 1.00 firmware version. In my first test, I added a few songs to the device, only to be greeted with a “MP3 ERR” message when trying to reproduce most of them. Most of my music files are embedded with album art, and it didn’t took long to realize that the Oomi had trouble reproducing those files. Furthermore the Oomi would lock when trying to add or delete music from it and I had to format it several times.

I emailed Josh Welensky from AMP3 about it, and he pointed me to the 1.02 firmware version which fixed things to a large degree. (A couple of days later, I upgraded to the recently released 1.03 firmware version.) The new firmware fixed the lock problems completely and now most of the files with album art on’em play fine. The ones that keep bringing the “MP3 ERR” message are those with more than one or two art files (e.g. CD front, back, inside) embedded on them—I’d still like to see this fixed because my MuVo plays those fine, but I understand that multiple art files aren’t a common occurence.

An other bug I’ve noticed: I keep getting some random 1-sec noise snippets before the beginning of a track. This doesn’t happen in every song, but it appears often enough. I didn’t examine it closely to determine a pattern, but it may have to do with album art since it’s stored in the beginning of the file. Something to keep in mind for the EZAV engineers when releasing a new firmware version.

This firmware upgrading process also answered another question I originally had… what happens to firmware development of a branded device? I was under the impression that it would be (near to) non-existant, but I was glad to see this was not the case. As I gathered from my correspondence with Josh, they’re serious about this and keep in touch with the factory, updating them with the latest bugs found.

Also, while we’re on the topic of firmware updates, logs with the changes and bugfixes should accompany each release.

Sound Quality

First of all, the Oomi is incredibly loud; using regular earbuds I rarely found myself going for more than 8/25 in the volume slider. According to the specs, each channel produces 20mW—that’s a total output of 40mW, and the SNR is rated at 90dB. A strong output is good to have, but what happens with the sound in those higher volume levels? When I paired the Oomi with my BeyerDynamic DT 440s and turned the volume up a little, I did notice some sliiight, easy to miss hiss; it accentuates the trebles a bit too much, if you wish. Good news from the bass deparmtent though, as I found it strong and articulate.

Also: the equalizer had a nice surprise for us—besides several (always useless) presets, there was room for two user-defined ones. You only get to tweak three sliders which carry no indication as to what frequency they’re related with, but still, it’s better than nothing. You can also tweak the “DBB” (Double Bass Boost) and “3D” presets using a slider.

Battery

Our sample lasted for about 11 hours (specs rate it at 12 hours) with average use and volume levels (~7/25). This figure isn’t something exceptional nowadays; however the Oomi could be forgiven because of its small size. Note that setting the screen to always on, will drain the juice fast. This is a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery we’re talking about. Charging takes about 2 hours, via USB with the included cable (that you connect to the headphone jack, as we’ve already mentioned). AMP3 says you can return the player to them or the manufacturer to replace the battery—this will set you back around £10-15.

Price

AMP3 sells the 512MB version for £79 (~€114/$147), the 1GB version for £99 (~€144/$184) and the 2GB version for £119 (~€173/$222).

[UPDATE: Since July 10th, AMP3 has reduced the price for all capacities by £10/€14.6/$18.4. So the 512MB now goes for £69/€99/$129, the 1GB for £89/€129/$166 and the 2GB model for £109/€158/$204.]

In comparison, the 1GB iPod nano goes for £95 (~138/$177) and the 2GB one goes for £128 (~€186/$238). But you have to spend some more for a decent case here, so the price difference is a bit bigger.

Pros

• Surprisingly strong output and very good sound quality
• Small size, solid construction, relatively sratch-free
• EQ allows two user-defined presets
• Decent extras: voice recorder and sleep timer
• PC/Mac compatible, USB 2.0
• Firmware development seems to be active

Cons

• A bit pricey
• Average battery life
• Weak FM tuner
• Screen looks cool indoors, but is impossible to read when outdoors during daylight
• Random 1-sec noises are occasionally heard before the beginning of a track
• Menu hierarchy is difficult to get
• Inability to reproduce music files with multiple art files embedded

Conclusion

The Datasafe Oomi does a fantastic job sound-wise, for such a miniscule device. Several of the bugs I’ve noted (album art, random noise) could be fixed by future firmware releases—the screen, battery life and FM tuner are its weakest links (in that order) I think.

The form factor is nice and construction-wise it’s durable enough; the thing is, and that’s what you have to keep in mind when deciding whether to get the Oomi or not: how much are you willing to give up for the small size?

File browsing and menu-setting are implemented in quite a decent way considering the limited screen estate. But that doesn’t mean it’s handy or easy on the eyes; sure you get to learn it after a few days, but is it better than when you’re looking for that track on your iPod nano? No.

Finally there’s the price. A £10 reduction would have made the Oomi a much better deal; as it is, people may be tempted to go Nano. [UPDATE: Since July 10th, a £10 price reduction is in effect.] [UPDATE #2: Since August 13th, there have been additional discounts. The 512MB model now goes for £59/€88/$111 (an additional £10 off), 1GB for £69/€99/$129 (an additional £20 off) and the 2GB version for £89/€129/$166 (an additional £20 off).]

Rating: 7/10

(Before closing this, we would like to thank AMP3 for providing us with a review sample.)

Product Pages

• Datasafe Oomi 512MB—£79 (~€114/$147)
• Datasafe Oomi 1GB—£99 (~€144/$184)
• Datasafe Oomi 2GB—£119 (~€173/$222)

[UPDATE: Since July 10th, AMP3 has reduced the price for all capacities by £10/€14.6/$18.4. So the 512MB now goes for £69/€99/$129, the 1GB for £89/€129/$166 and the 2GB model for £109/€158/$204.]

[UPDATE #2: Since August 13th, there have been additional discounts. The 512MB model now goes for £59/€88/$111 (an additional £10 off), 1GB for £69/€99/$129 (an additional £20 off) and the 2GB version for £89/€129/$166 (an additional £20 off).]