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| Wed Sep 6, 2000 - 9:30 PM EDT - By James Hromadka | |
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To
play a song, when you're in MiniJukeBox press
the Play button to begin playing the first
song. Use any of the screen icons or MiniJam hardware buttons to
change songs and volume. Tap the down arrow at the top right and
select Playlist to get the entire listing.
One nice feature of the MiniJam is that you can use the Visor's up/down
buttons to scroll through the listing and press the ToDo button to begin
playing the selected song, allowing you to select songs without needing
the stylus.
The music sounds excellent with the MiniJam. I listened to the included songs and a few of my own, and songs like "Bohemian Rhapsody" had no distortion during its a cappella portions. It is as if I had my own portable concert!
All of the MiniJam's hardware buttons have a dual function if you hold
down a button for a few seconds. You can customize them by going
into MiniJukeBox then Playback
| Preferences then tapping the Buttons
icon. Here are the buttons and their defaults:
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| Play/Pause | Press once to play & again to pause | Stop |
| Next/FFW | Skip to next MP3 | FFW within an MP3 |
| Prev./Rewind | Skip to previous MP3 | Rewind within an MP3 |
| Volume Up | Increase Volume | Continuously increases volume |
| Volume Down | Decrease Volume | Continuously decreases volume |
| MJ Control (circle) | Run MiniJukeBox | Puts MiniJam in sleep mode |
| Sound Control (square) | Cycles Sound settings | Mute |
Playing songs is just like a normal CD player. One thing that I noticed is that the skins don't have a pause feature; I spoke to InnoGear about this and they will be adding this to their skin creator. Tapping the Play button starts the selected song from the beginning, and tapping it again stops the song and resets the timer to 0:00. You can, however, use the hardware Play button to pause the song.
When playing a song, you can switch to another application and the MiniJam will keep playing. You can then use the MiniJam's hardware buttons to change volume and track selection. Press the MJ Control (dot) to return to MiniJukeBox. There is no slowdown at all in any applications that I could see; in fact, PocketMark was 3 points higher when using the MiniJam!
FileMover
Ok here's the bad news: you can't store non-MP3 files on the MiniJam's MMC -- yet. InnoGear, after taking a lot of heat about the MiniJam's delays, chose to release the MiniJam first and add the MMC file management feature later as a software update to the MiniJam. While I'd like to see this feature now, I'm glad to be able to use the MiniJam for its intended purpose now, not later. I will say that ROM updates are possible on the MiniJam, as I did one over the course of my review. This review will be updated when the data storage feature becomes available.
With the FileMover that comes with the
MiniJam you can store up to 2MB of applications and static data on the
MiniJam's Flash RAM. See the
review
of the 8MB Flash module for details on how FileMover works.
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