I was expecting the worst when it came to battery usage, but the MiniJam
seems to make excellent use of power saving features. As the MiniJam
can run in the background, battery life can vary. According to InnoGear,
battery life is 5 to 7 hours but playing games or using the backlight in
the foreground can drop it to 2 to 3 hours. As with other Springboard
modules, I saw the battery meter drop pretty low during use, but the meter
went back up when the MiniJam was not in use.
The best advice I can give is to make sure that you put the MiniJam
into sleep mode (hold the MJ Control for a few seconds) after you're done
listening to music. You can also change the Sleep
Timeout by going into MiniJukeBox and
changing Playback | Preferences to a shorter
time. The MiniJam will beep once when it goes into sleep mode.
Another way to extend battery life is to record MP3 tracks at a lower
sample rate than the 128Kbs default, such as 64Kbs (radio quality).
This also allows you to squeeze more tracks onto your MMC.
Additional Features
InnoGear
didn't chintz on the extra software on the MiniJam. In addition to
the great desktop software, you also get full (not shareware) versions of AlbumToGo
and Peanut Reader stored in the
2MB of flash RAM. Peanut Press allows eBooks and DOC files to be
read on the Visor, and AlbumToGo allows the
user to view various photos on the Visor.
InnoGear is also working on a special MiniJam
website that have file uploading and other features. All Pre-order customers have access to this website, and InnoGear has extended this offer for at
least another 60 days to new MiniJam owners.
It is still
in beta and was not fully available for testing during the review, so its
feature list may change.
The earphones that come with the MiniJam have a very nice "wind up"
case that keeps you from having a tangled cable. Anything that fits
the headphone jack will work -- in fact, I did most of my testing using
my computer's speakers.
The MiniJam doesn't have a memory limitation, so as MMCs come out with more memory you can effectively double the number of songs you can carry. If
you have the money, I suggest you get the 64MB version of the MiniJam, as 64MB MMCs are not yet available outside of OEMs, and 32MB
MMCs are expensive.
Cases & Conclusion >>
