Toshiba gigabeat MEV30K Review by LAPTOP Magazine

Toshiba's gigabeat S wowed us with its impressive feature list, slick UI, and sleek design. Now the company is going bigger with the V series, which sports a larger 3.5-inch screen for $50 more. Unfortunately, we weren't quite as impressed.

The gigabeat MEV30K doesn't make a good first impression. Its housing is made of shiny plastic-and lots of it. This unit lacks the Archos 604's beautiful aluminum construction. In fact, Archos builds the same size screen (3.5 inches) into a significantly smaller unit. By contrast, the MEV30K's two-tone case tries but fails to hide the unit's imposing girth.

The thumb control is downright strange. It's suitably large and has a good amount of range in its movement, but in an attempt to isolate it from being bumped while in a pocket, Toshiba recessed it into the casing and surrounded it with a chrome plastic ring. As a result, the control is both difficult and uncomfortable to use.

On the plus side, we like the front-facing Menu, Back, and Volume keys. Some people might prefer a cleaner design with fewer buttons (such as-ahem-a click wheel). But Toshiba's multiple-button approach worked well when navigating the slick Portable Media Center 2.0.

The MEV30K's screen is exceedingly bright while still managing reasonably deep black levels, an impressive achievement. Less impressive is its 320 x 240-pixel resolution; we easily saw artifacts during testing. Videos and movie trailers generally looked okay, but photos showed all the limitations of the low-resolution screen; everything looked seriously pixelated. We also transferred some higher-resolution content to the MEV30K. The unit scaled it down well and played it back fine, but overall none of our test videos looked sharp enough.

The gigabeat MEV30K sounds clear and detailed through the included earbuds. It displays album art when available, and it connects to a slew of online music services, such as Napster and Rhapsody. Toshiba bundles a 30-day free trial of the Vongo movie download service, though Vongo already offers a 14-day free trial to all new subscribers.

As with the gigabeat S, we ran into issues getting Vongo to work properly. Despite a day's worth of troubleshooting with Vongo representatives, we never successfully transferred any test videos from our laptop to the MEV30K. Vongo suspects the problem is due to the just-released Gold version of WMP 11 and is working on a fix.

For some reason, you can't charge the unit via USB; you have to use the power adapter. Worse, this means that you're draining the battery while transferring content from your computer. The MEV30K's battery is rated at 8 hours for video and a whopping 30 hours for music playback. On our tests, the device lasted 7 hours and 16 minutes when playing video, which is hours ahead of its competitors.

When backhanded compliments such as "good battery life" and "versatile online store support" are the best you can give, there's clearly a problem with the MEV30K's overall design. It's moderately pleasing in a 2004 first-generation-PMP sort of way. But it doesn't have the "gotta-have-it" factor that graces the Archos 604, the 5.5G iPod, or even Toshiba's own gigabeat S.

In fact, we're not sure why Toshiba didn't take the gigabeat S and add a wider, higher-resolution screen, and a larger battery.

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Toshiba gigabeat MEV30K

For $299, the gigabeat MEV30K combines Portable Media Center's ease of use with a big screen.

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