Not a bad 1st generation product, but flawed

Author's Rating:

Pros: FM Tuner, Line-in recording, same size as IPOD, pretty, great sound quality, external HD

Cons: Slow menus, bad scrolling, no documentation or support, pained playlist creation

The Bottom Line: 
Great concept, but doesn't deliver. Give it some documentation, good software to use with it, and some support and this thing would be fantastic.

Author's Review
All in all, the MPIO HD300 is a pretty good player. When looking at it on paper, it seems unstoppable. FM Tuner, Line-in recording, same size/weight as an IPOD, good looking, great sound quality, external hard drive functionality. It definitely has all of the above, but after that, there are some burning flaws with this thing that I could not get over.

First off, the documentation on this thing is worthless- it tells you basic navigation, which could be figured out on your own, but after that it does not do much. It does not explain how to do a firmware upgrade, which is crucial to get this thing running right. I was locking up like crazy before I loaded the new firmware.

Once the new firmware was loaded, I copied my music using basic drag and drop into the MUSIC folder on the HD300. It was relatively quick to tranfer ~15gb onto the unit. I put all the music in the same folder, but that was a mistake- only the first 256 files show up on the player. Even worse, the HD300 creates multiple playlists for artist/genre/album using the MPIO utility, and when trying to access one of them for a song that was not part of the initial 256, the player would lock up. After a lot of fooling around with the player, I realized I could put in my own folder/file structure based on artist/album, which worked. After running the MPIO utility again, it was good to go. I could actually play my music and see it on the player.

I was happy at first- the sound quality was outstanding. This changed as time went by using the unit. Going between folders and songs in the player is S-L-O-W. It takes awhile going between songs, and entering or going back in directories takes forever. If you are a patient person, this will not be a problem. I have some patience, but when you are browsing your music and it takes a really long time to go from one folder to the next, it starts getting you down. Another downside to browsing: It sorts alphabetically rather than by track numbers. I am not sure if any players do this better or if this is my own gripe.

Other reasons for my return:
*The lack of firmware updates in the past almost 6 months.
*The lack of any sort of support- go to the forums and check out some of the complaints about support before buying this player.
*The pains of creating custom playlists- To create a custom playlist, you have to use a program like MP3tag to create it, and then go through and remove all the drive letters. This would have been a lot easier if they had a utility to do it for you like other players do.
* No charging on the USB

All in all, if I was to rate this thing, it would be on the following criteria:

Design: 8 of 10
Features: 8 of 10
Functionality: 3 of 10
Documentation/Support: 2 of 10
Connecting to computer/download speeds: 6 of 10 (would be 10 of 10 if it charged off the USB)
Navigation (using buttons): 6 of 10 (scroll pad a little funny)