Ever thought of using your cellular phone to listen to music?
Well, that’s exactly what the new Ericsson HPM-10 does. It’s an MP3 player
that works with the Ericsson T28, R320, R310, and A2618 mobile phones. It relies
upon the handset’s battery for power. It attaches itself to the mobile
handset, and the headphones are then attached to it. This way, you can keep the
mobile phone in your pocket, like you normally would in a ‘hands-free’
system.
If you receive a call while the music is playing, the MP3
player immediately pauses letting you hear the ring. The microphone has all the
MP3 controls on it, so you can take your call by pressing the button on it. When
you finish your call, the player resumes playing the music.
Its user interface is quite simple. You can select play all,
random play or select a particular track. Besides volume, you can set the treble
and bass levels.
Music playback is crystal clear though the maximum volume is
relatively low. People who like pounding volumes in their ears will be
disappointed. We played music for around six hours at full volume, over four
days before the handset’s batteries required recharging.
HPM-10 is just a player and not a writer. So you can’t
delete songs or use it like an audio recorder. It comes with a separate
multimedia card reader/writer for loading songs onto its 32 MB flash card. Once
the card reader is setup, it looks like another drive on your computer. You can
then simply use Windows Explorer to drag and drop music files to the media card.
We got transfer speeds of about 2.5 MB per minute for uploading files, 18 MB per
minute for downloading, and deleting files happens in seconds.
Sandeep Saxena in Mumbai