I have been selling these multimedia MP4 players from China for about nine months now. Even though I have had a torrid time with players that don't work, or players that people return because they feel they have been sold something less than what they were expecting, I have a large installed base of product out there that is working and working so well that some of my customers have been back, and back, to buy players for other members of the family.

After all, if we compare our Blade Players with the Apple Nano, you don't have to outlay $215 to $240 for a 1GB machine, and furthermore, we have less expensive product, with greater number of features. The typical Blade 1GB provides FM Radio Tuning, Recording from FM Radio, Voice Recording, Text Document Storage and Display, Hidden Items in a locked disk space, and last but most impressive for a machine at the 1GB level is the video playback feature.

Without a doubt, the Blade Player from China would never have been constructed if it had not been for the Apple Nano (See another guide on this issue). Some people like to think that the Blade is a Nano look-alike; while it undoubtedly has derived some of its physical features from the Nano, there are many features of the Blade that has come about through manufacturers interacting with the owners of its machines in the marketplace.

Memory
Now starting out to buy one of these Blade Players, you need to consider what size you want first. Similar to the Nano, Blade Players are not fitted with memory expansion, so the memory you start with is the memory you have. Having said that though, you need to consider a Blade Player as an extension of your PC; or put it the other way; you need to consider your PC as an extension of the capabilities of the Blade.

Personally, I prefer the lighter 1GB player and I have my range of music repertoire on my PC. Each play list, or Album, or however I have organized each group is given a folder -- yes, that's right -- a Windows folder full of one play list. In the evening when I arrive home, I connect my 1GB Blade to my PC, which is as easy as plugging a USB cord to the computer and my Blade and there it is listed as one of the drives on my PC. I delete a folder or two of those play lists that I have had enough of at the moment, and move onto the player those play lists that I want to listen to in the next few days.

Let's not get distracted with the 2GB machine. On we go with looking at the 1GB Blade in either sleek black, or shimmering white; the Black and White Blade's have exactly the same features, usually. But that is where we need to consider the Blade player and how and where Blade's are manufactured.

The Tale of Two Players
While we may consider the Blade as signonomous (an object with one signature, or one manufacture) in reality Blade Multimedia Players are built in more than seventy or so factories mainly in the Shenzhen District of People's Republic of China and have several different permutations as each factory has tweaked the building of this product. Why the Blade has such a similar look and feel is that they have purchased a 'common mould' with a business that has completed the research and development needed to draw up templates, moulds, purchasing lists, manuals, and so on.

There are at least two different moulds for the Blade Player. They can be identified by some minor markings and positioning of outlets on the player. One of the moulds has the word "Menu" marked at the top position of the round four-way switch on the front of the player; the other has an "M" marked in that position. Another distinguishing feature is that the USB port on one is placed on the bottom edge of the player at the right hand side; the other has the USB port on the right-hand edge near the bottom with a little rubber plug to keep unwanted dust from entering the casing. In my understanding, the machine with the "M" on the four-way switch is the older design and has some significant drawbacks compared with the newer mould.

Video Replay
So what can we do with the Blade MP4 Player? A mighty lot for a multimedia machine that costs usually under AU$149.00. In top position, on one version of the Blade, is movie/clip playing. Now these two versions of the Blade use different standards. One of them, the older of them, uses a rather obscure Chinese standard .AMV. If your player has the letter AMV instead of the word "Movie" on the menu for this video playing section, you will need to convert nearly anything you obtain to the AMV standard as very few items if any are virgin AMV format movies/clips. You are not conversion free on the other version of the Blade either. Movies/clips for the newer version of the Blade use the MTV format, which is a little less obscure. However, most items will need to be converted.

For both the types of Blade Player, conversion software usually is sold with the player. Some how, though, your troubles just start when considering the conversion software. After loading the conversion software from the neat little CD provided with the player, you find that everything is written in Chinese. Well, I can provide you with conversion software that is in English and can be used to format video files to be played on the Blade. Just ask me for this.

1.5” Screen
Movies/clips that you can or can't watch on this player is more about what you can watch on a 1.5" screen which is the standard screen. A slightly different version of the Blade has a 1.8" screen, but even then, the size of screen and how much detail you can see, is about how much you want to squint when watching a movie. Put it this way, a seven year old grandchild watched A Pink Panther Cartoon right through, several Simpson episodes and still wanted more. So it can't be too bad if it holds an easily distracted child to watching 1.5" of space on this wide world for more than a couple of hours.

For many, playing MP3s is where this machine needs to shine, and I believe it does just that. I have listened to my first Blade Player for a total of 100 minutes a day for five days a week over the last nine months -- and still I do not tire from listening to my music over this machine. True, I did not stick with the earphones supplied with the machine. The phone supplied with the machine had a kind of necklace little clip thingy going on as part of the cord. I bought a different set of earphones with a metal sheathing around the phone to get a better quality out of the sound produced. The player actually provides a very good quality sound; if you find the sound is not of a good quality, the chances are that you need something better than the 75c pair made to look like an iPod pair of earphones. So that means I have listened to my Blade for a total of about 17,500 minutes or 291 hours.

How Many Songs?
So how many songs can be prodded onto a 1GB Blade Player. The answer to such a question is not simple -- unlike the advertising blurb that Apple bandies around the place. It really depends on which format you save your files onto your player. If you place them onto your player in native Windows format which is WMA (Windows Media Audio) you are going to be able to fit quite a few less than if you use the MP3 format which is a condensed format. In a 1GB Player with 1GB available for song storage, you are going to fit in about 250 provided that they are not more than of about 3 minutes per song and are saved in a format that makes most use of your player's solid storage area. And that fills all available storage area and does not give you any room for keeping a few photos of the kids, a couple of voice recordings detailing the stuff I need to pick up from the supermarket.

However, 250 songs of 3 minutes each is how much playing? That is 12.5 hours of playing. Come on, are you going to listen to 12.5 hours of songs before your player and computer can be married up again? This is what I do. I have two may be three folders of songs on board at any one time, some photos, some text documents and a few clips that I think are absolutely funny and want to share with those working around me. No problems.

Voice Recording
Besides music clips and songs, we have voice recording. The number stats are bewildering on this -- something like 16 hours of recording using the long play format, or about 3 hours recording on the short play version.  Stupidly, recording close to your mouth is not that really good -- a bit muffled for my liking -- but recording in a lecture hall the other day gave surprising results of clarity. I do like the short recording format best as it records a wider spectrum of sound, whereas the long playing version cuts a lot of bass and a lot of treble.

When you playback your recording, you will value the little piece of advice I am just going to give you. I sat through a 2 hour lecture and didn't touch the player once. When I got home, I thought I would listen to a little of what had been recorded. I listened to about ten minutes worth and thought this was great.

I stopped listening and then later after dinner thought I would carry on listening. Gotcha! It started from the beginning. I did fast forward and it took me to the end. I clicked on listening again and it started from the start. Now when I am recording something of that length, during recording I stop the recording for just a second and then back on again creating natural files of just about ten minutes each. Now they are a lot easier to handle in nice little 10 minute bytes.

Photo Album
A little care in selecting and preparing your .JPG portfolio can go a long way to making an otherwise little 1.5" screen act like a much larger screen. The screen on the Blade is square -- 128 pixels x 128 pixels. So for goodness sake do not whack a 195 x 128 pixel .JPG on the screen. What happens is that the 195 is de-sized to 128 pixels and the 128 pixels of the photograph is de-sized proportionately to less than 100 pixels.

So not only is your photograph minimized to a little squib-by thing, but also you are wasting a proportion of the height of the screen which is now black. If you prepare each .JPG photo to be a nice 128 x 128 file and then save that to a folder of files that have been prepared for that format, you can get a great deal more from the screen when showing those pre-prepared files. People ask me over and over again if my screen is more than 1.5" -- then they say, "But how come I can see your pictures so clearly?" All it is about is using the full value of the screen space I got by cutting my photos to fit the space.

E-book Storage
The Blade Multimedia Player also allows for storing e-books. Well, the Chinese exuberance in calling these e-books is way over the limit of believability. What really this is all about is that a .TXT file can be saved and viewed via this little 1.5"screen. The only use I have found for these little .TXT documents is a list of just about every Username and Password couple I own.  "But wow", I heard you say, "keeping these in a device like that! It could be stolen, lost, and then your identity could be stolen." Well not really. This is where the Blade has just that nice little superior edge -- even though it is the poor cousin.

Encrypt A Portion of Memory
With just a little effort, and pacing my way through a Chinese riddle of Chinese English-isms, I encrypted a nugget of the solid state system so that prying eyes will never see my passwords. Now, when I pass my Blade over for the ‘gooing’ and ‘gahing’ of ladies over my cute grandchildren, I know they will never have a hope of seeing my passwords for just about anything. AND might I warn, I just about never saw my passwords again forgetting that one password combination and for one long weekend I kept trying and trying until it told me that I had to stop trying for at least 30 minutes. And then, at 2:00am after a bathroom call, I remembered it.

FM Radio Listening & Recording
Then when all music, TXT documents, JPGs and all else failed to muster ven just a minute slither of a drop of adrenaline, there is the FM Radio player. There are two common bands of FM Radio action possible -- the one common in Japan and then other that is common in most every other part of the world except the North Pole and Mt Everest. You can store about 20 presets on each band and thus jump from station to station ad nauseam, ad lib. And hiding behind the nice little blue and green and every other colour of screen, is one little screen that would never normally be found except that after now getting into and seeing my passwords again, and kissing the Blade player until it became embarrassed as a ten year old being kissed by Mum in front of all her friends, I began pressing any of the seven buttons on the machine to see what I could find. And there lurking behind the FM Radio screen where the stations were all playing the music they would never dare to play during the day, I found a new screen.

WOW! What happened here with this screen? Aha, here I could record any station that the Blade is tuned to. Sure this recording is not the most fantastic of recordings, but when rattling down the train line at 7:30 AM in the morning what really does sound that good? Yes, it is possible indeed to record lots of music this way; but hey, music men, don't get your knickers in a knot, people get sick of this poor sounding music after awhile, and no cost music loses its grip and once more I turn to the front of the player and downloading stuff that actually sounds good.

Download Music from Everywhere
There are a couple of things you should know further about the Blade. You can indeed download music from thousands of locations on the Internet. Unlike the iPod Nano which of course has your player bridled to the money maker iTunes. Blade enables you to be free to buy your tunes from wherever you like; and there are some really good sites which allow you to buy fully legal music at way less than iTunes.

All of these reasons above are the reason I am fully into selling and giving Blades a more welcome home all across the world.
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About the author Dr Elwyn Jenkins: Dr Jenkins is a retired academic who has built a full-time business selling on eBay. Dr Jenkins business Speedy Electronics Australia sells Southern Chinese Players and can give you more than just a purchase of a machine. Speedy Electronics Australia provides you with a guarantee of performance, insurance on your machine as well as a One Year Warranty.