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Meizu Mini Player SL 8GB media player

Flac and Ogg support to the fore

The results proved to be surprisingly watchable, with playback being both reasonably crisp and fluid. While we're not for one moment suggesting that the Mini will supplant the Cowon A3 in our affections, but you could happily stick a handful of feature films on it and save them for a rainy day. Being landscape in design you can hold the Mini the right way round while watching your videos.

Loading content onto the Mini is a straightforward case of drag and drop, but you'll need to make sure all your files have the version 2.3 ID3 tags. Anything using version 2.2 tags or earlier will end up in the Land of the Unknown. Luckily, the Mini has a "Browser" view that shows each album folder, so it isn't the end of the world if things don't end in the right place, just a bit annoying.

Meizu Mini Player SL 8GB media player

iPod iNspired?

The Mini also comes with the ability to set up playlists on the go, which is just as well as you can't sync them via Windows Media Player. However, it does sport a voice recorder; calender; stopwatch; calculator; support for JPEG, GIF and BMP image files; and two rather strange games. In Asia, it also comes with an FM radio, but this is disabled for the UK market in order to avoid an eight per cent import duty. You can get around this via a firmware update from the Meizu website, but that sends your store warranty straight out the window.

The only way to power the Mini is to use the supplied USB cable. Time to a full charge is little over four hours, which will give you about 32 hours of music - four hours shy of the manufacturer's claim. Video playback will of course shorten that. We played The Incredibles video through twice and still had juice left, so you should get at least four hours of video out of it.

Verdict

Eighty quid for an 8GB player with Flac and AVI file support is a decent combination in anyone's language. The sound could be better and the control interface takes some getting used to, but other than that its not a bad little player. The bundled reformatting software is best avoided, though, and we would have liked the ID tag recognition to have been more thorough.

Meizu Mini SL supplied by Advanced MP3 Players

75%

Meizu Mini Player SL 8GB media player

A decent little MP3 player that supports Ogg, Flac and AVI files, has a good battery life, and an "original" control system.
Price: £50 (2GB), £60 (4GB), £80 (8GB) RRP

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