| #813 - Eureka LX351 Portable Media Player |
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| Written by Zach Jeffers | ||||||||||||||||||
| Thursday, 26 April 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||
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Conclusion: The ZIO Eureka is a pretty impressive solution at its price range. The Eureka LX351 has a pretty basic and bland user interface. It uses about four shades of blue. Play back of video was smooth and as crisp as your TV will allow. We experienced one crash of the LX351 while watching a MP4 video clip downloaded from YouTube. This only happened once while trying to rewind the video file. We experienced no lag or crashed of any kind after this single event. Playback of most files was flawless and only AVI’s gave us grief, but that is because it is not on the list of supported video formats. The remote was fairly user friendly and intuitive. The remote is pretty light and cheap feeling, so I conducted a supervised ‘throw the remote across the room’ test. The remote passed with flying colors without even so much as a battery cover flying off. The way that the unit handles types of files was a bit cheesy to me. Say for instance, you select the pictures area of the device; the LX351 will simply keep your directory tree and hide any files not recognized as a picture files. This concept follows through with the rest of the ‘categories’. I would have liked to have seen the device automatically create playlists and such, but then that would start moving into a smart media device which this is not marketed as. Over all the ZIO Eureka LX351 is a pretty decent media storage device for the money. At fewer than three figures, this fancy external enclosure can act like your normal external storage, and then when you go out of town, take your favorite Divx movies, photo galleries, etc. with you. You can even upgrade the hardware firmware when a newer version comes out. One thing that surprised me was that the Eureka enclosure played my VIDEO_TS files! You can also manually create bookmarks and favorites, playlists and more. I give the LX351 a Great award only due to the fact that the GUI is pretty bland and that the enclosure is entirely made out of plastic. I would have liked to have seen Aluminum used to help cool the drive and allow for a bit more rugged use. Our thanks go out to Geeks.com for their contribution to this review and their continued support of 3dGameMan.
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