Panasonic SV-SD50 MP3 Player
Panasonic brings the smallest MP3 player to the table, redefining "titchy" along the way.The Panasonic SV-SD50 is a small MP3 player which fits neatly into the palm of your hand -- or shirt pocket, which makes it easy to carry. It measures 43.3 x 44.5 x 17.3 mm, and looks fairly stylish with a deep blue and silver cover. It comes with a lanyard to hand the device around your neck, but we found it more comfortable to store in our pocket.
The player has a simple button layout, which makes it easy to use but does mean there's not a lot of things you can do on the actual player. Pressing a three-way jog dial on the side allows you play and stop (or more accurately, pause) the tracks and rolling the dial up or down moves to the previous or following track. Holding the dial up or down moves backward or forward within a song.
Below the jog dial are two volume buttons, and on the other side of the SV-SD50 is a hold button, which stops the device from responding to any other buttons. The other three buttons are on the front of the player, underneath a small LCD display.
The tracks are stored on a Panasonic SD card which pushes into the bottom of the device, and hooks up to a computer through a USB attachment. A 64Mb card (which comes with the player) can hold between 25-30 tracks, depending on their size. To save tracks to the SD card you first have to load the RealPlayer-based Panasonic Media Manager onto your computer.
The Media Manager allows you to save files from CD to your computer in a variety of formats, and transfer songs to the SD card if it's hooked up to the computer. The card needs to be formatted by the Media Manager before it can be used, and songs are placed onto the card in the order they are saved there. You cannot simply copy the files into the card by cut-and-pasting from windows.
The menu on the Media Manager changes depending on what you are doing. To move music files to the player you click "add clips", which pops up a menu with all the music available, which can be sorted by individual tracks, artist, album or genre. You select the tracks to move and click "add tracks" on the pop-up menu, then close it. You then have to return to the original menu and click "transfer", which seems like a redundant step to us.
The Panasonic SD-SV50 is a simple MP3/music player that allows you to perform the basic functions of a music player. Like the Creative MP3 player 2, the 64MB supplied card size is a touch small; we suspect you'd need to invest in an additional 128MB card to make the SD-SV50 really worthwhile.
Panasonic SD-SV50
Company: Panasonic Australia
Price: AU$439
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 132 600
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Hi! I recently put a Sony MZ-N510 on layby of $350. It's my first update sine a discman. Should I keep it or find another one? Any comments are more than welcome! Thanks!