Detailed Beyond epod MP3 Player Description & Review

Beyond: epod £140.00inc. VAT  &  Delivery

The epod has been superseded by the 3rd generation 8GB blue iPod nano. Please go to that page instead. This page's model is no longer available.

How do you cash in on the popularity of a trademark, without infringing on it? We don't know, and we're not sure that Beyond do either.

What is beyond an iPod? An ePod! Ho ho. The real question is, as usual, what is it and is it any good?

E? I? E? I? Oh!

Worst paragraph heading since our "super tragic kareoke MP3 atrocious" headline. The point that we are slowly meandering towards is that the iPod and the ePod are really quite different in terms of what you get for your money and what each of them can do.

Here is a list of the ePods capabilities.

• Digital Camcorder Record high quality digital video and easily transfer it to your computer for viewing and editing.
• Digital Still Camera Take high quality digital still pictures (up to 6 megapixels, software interpolated).
• Digital Music Player Listen to MP3 music files with the provided earphones or through the internal speaker.
• Voice Recorder Record and listen to voice memos on the go.

And?

Web Camera Use the ePods for live video conferences with your friends and family over the internet.

Portable Storage Store movies, photos, songs, voice memos, and other documents directly on the 128MB built in memory as well as on optional memory expansion cards (up to 1GB using SD or MMC memory cards).

Normally to get functions like digital camcorder/ digital photography and music recorder the capacity of the player is very high. For 2 simple reasons:

• Video and stills require a huge amount of storage space - a 10 second clip can easily be 1MB. One big picture can be even more than that.
• Building in a camera of any quality increases the overall production cost significantly.

Conclusions:

This is a nice little device with a lot of features. Think of it as a supercharged RAM player, rather than a hamstrung HD Jukebox and you'll get an idea of what its like to own. Using the ePod as a web camera encourages you to use it more frequently as a camera socially too. It won't suit everyone, but for some people this unit is ideal.