The MPIO FY400: A Decent Alternative to the IPod
The MPIO FY400 comes with a built in USB plug so you can plug it directly into your computer without needing a separate USB cable. There is no utility installation required to transfer music files. An optional USB cable is provided to reach the back of your computer if you need it. You can then move files back and forth to the player using drag and drop in an application such as Windows Explorer. The moment you drag and drop your music files they are in your mp3 player because the MPIO FY400 has a transfer rate of 40Mbps.
The MPIO FY400 has great battery life as well. It can last for up to 20 hours continuously on a single AAA battery. Changing modes from FM tuner to voice recording can be done by touching a single button. There is no need to enter a menu screen to change the mode because you can just hit one button to do it. The FM tuner allows users to auto-scan, preset, store, and record any FM station easily. The FY400 also has an unlimited folder function which lets users make as many internal folders as they want. Users can make folders based on anything like artists or genres. Browsing stored files while listening to music is easy and it does not interfere with playback at all.
The amount of songs you can fit depends on the size of the memory capacity and the compression rate of your music files. The larger the memory, the more music files you can store. The standard compression rate of mp3 files is 128kps which is considered CD quality. The general rule for figuring out how many songs you can have is 1 minute of music takes about 1 MB of space. If your average songs last about 4 minutes then you can fit about then you could fit about 64 songs on a player with 256 MB of internal space.
Overall, the MPIO FY400 is decent mp3 player. The 1GB version can hold about 250 songs depending on compression rate. That isn’t is a bad amount of songs to have on your mp3 player. Do you really want to have 10,000 mp3s on your mp3 player? Who listens to that many songs? The MPIO runs from about $120 to $180 depending on the size of the internal memory. The MPIO FY400 is a decent alternative to the iPod and RIO mp3 players. It is relatively cheap and it holds a decent amount of songs. It also has voice recording and an FM tuner. You can’t beat that for $120.
