Nationite S:Flo2

I feel badly writing a negative review because I am the kind of person who tends to be grateful for the positives, and lets the negatives slide, but...I wish someone had spoken up about what a horrible, terrible job the S:Flo2 guys did on the UI. I am a software designer and programmer and I understand just how difficult it is to work with some interfaces and you have to do the best you can with what you've got, but the final product for the S:Flo should never had gotten out the door. It is NOT ready for prime time.

I would need to write several hundred words to really convey to you just what a really bad interface it is and just how frustrating it is to work with.

Make a mistake while scrolling or selecting a song and you are penalized by being sent back to the menu and having to start from position 1 again in you're quest to scroll down a couple hundred songs, 7 to a screen a time.

Rather than tell you and make you read all of this let me just sum it up as saying the S:Flo2 is the biggest tragedy in PMP history. The sound quality is just fantastic. I love Wolfson DACs and the twin Wolfsons to the Line-out are really the best SQ for the money I have ever heard. Truly fine, quality sound. But although I have tried, over and over to master the scrolling and navigation, it is helpless. It can never be mastered, only endured.

I feel sorry for Raz at MP4Nation.net. He appears to be a really nice guy and he stood behind his offer and delivered all the extras and did his best to get a good product but in the end, it will never be a giant killer with the interface it has.

And when I look on the forums to see if new firmware is out, it has been very quiet there, and no announcements since June or July on firmware updates.

So in the end, it was an inexpensive venture into very good SQ with a very poor interface for me.

i listen (mainly) to classic rock, alt rock, prog rock, trance/dance, classical

i use cheap IEMs, grados, and aux connector to car

i am on firmware 2.20

i'll just list pros and cons.

pros:

-feels hefty and solid

-sq is great. HO and LO lives up to expectations no doubt about it.

-has a nifty auto off feature

-has an expansion slot

-if the mini plugs have no devices connected, it won't start playing the song. pretty cool.

-thank god for a reset button

-detects as usb mass storage so you can get to copying files straightaway without any software install.

cons:

-omg incredibly lousy UI. the two default skins are atrocious. the first one is too bright, the second too dark. it lists files by name, type, or date. literally. it seems unable to use the vorbis tags on my flac files. despite asking it to sort by name, it only does that for filenames. not albums. not artists. or maybe i just can't figure it out. but it shouldn't be so darn difficult!

-scrolling sucks. especially if you have super long lists. if your finger rests on the bottom a bit too long, it'll select it. then you have to hit the back button, and whoops, gotta start all over again.

-pressing back once while a song is playing does not set you to the beginning of the song. instead, it jumps you back an entire song. maybe that's normal behavior, but it sure annoys the crap out of me.

-there are no words describing functions of icons in the playing screen. you have to try each icon to figure out what it does. seems like other players do this too, but it still annoys me. what the heck is a gear symbol? ohhhh settings.

-fingerprints. omg fingerprint magnet. then again so are all touchscreens. sigh

-no physical buttons to control playback?! gAHHH! well how bout a hold (lockout) button? no?? well crap, what if my butt decides to switch songs?

-you have to hold down the only button on the thing to turn it on. how long? oh i dont know. at least 5 seconds.

-file transfer is slooooooooow. barely 5MB/s. (i'm on w7x64)

-the accelerometer? wait i dont think it has one. oh nm it does. it's just really stupid. you can only turn it one way otherwise it's just upside down. all pics display full screen vertically and nice big black bars on the left and right if you hold it horizontally. and all movies play horizontally.

-sometimes it doesn't want to quit charging mode and you have to hit the reset button.

-pretty sure vorbis tags on flac don't work

-plays cue files. slick. except it apparently doesn't read the time stamps correctly.

-flac playback is barely 10 hrs on one charge.