Admit it, real life is just not entertaining enough for most of us. Any contrary protests you may have will be drowned in the prolificacy of portable media players and the fact that we cannot hear you owing to the earphones plugged into our skulls. Our search for the ultimate media player takes us down many lanes, one of which led to Zebronics a few days ago. We took up the Zebronics Zebmate Cinema 4.3 media player for our latest review and here’s what followed.
Something told us the eye-watering packaging is meant to make up for a plain looking media player, that something being our previous encounter with the Zebmate Cinema 3.0. We pulled out a zebra striped box from the main wrapping and unearthed the Zebmate Cinema 4.3, user manual, kickstand, stylus, in-ear headphones, USB cord for transferring content to the device as well as charging it up through the switching adapter. The product packaging team’s questionable taste in color and design sits on the one side of the see-saw with the actual player’s boring appearance balancing it off perfectly on the other end.
A power on/off button which you’ll also need to use when the screen gets turned off to save on energy perches on the top frame. Along the left side are miniUSB, microSD, VGA and audio ports. The speakers peek out at you from the lower left side of the back panel and there’s a minute reset button which is so tiny as to be almost invisible on the bottom right side. There are these subtle grooves engraved into the top and bottom part of the frame for helping the kickstand to keep a firm grip on the player while it entertains you in landscape mode. Our first impression of the media player in terms of the facade? It’s like a present from that earnest friend who firmly believes people shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Need we wax poetic on this angle anymore?
We started our review of the Zebronics Zebmate Cinema 4.3 with the battery juiced up to full power and transferred a couple of ebooks, a horde of music, three movies and some photos onto it. The screen opens up to dedicated widgets for videos, ebooks, music, photos, FM, settings, resource, themes and light. We hit up the music option right away, found the speaker lacking in muscle and decided to plug in the earphones. The audio quality escaping this large match box of a device is really quite pleasant. It handles the entire range of tones without the slightest tremor and you can swing between rock, pop, DBB, nature, classic, jazz, soft or dance EQ modes while listening to music. The manufacturers have even squeezed in shuffle and star rating functions to keep you amused as you lend an ear to it.
It’s a pity there are no dedicated volume rockers to tweak the audio output levels though. The only way to adjust the volume is the onscreen icon for it and there are the usual controls for playing, pausing, fast forwarding, rewinding and so on. The on/off button also serves as a simpler way of pausing between tracks and another similar shortcut is the light widget for dimming or brightening the screen easily. The puzzling ‘updata dirempty’ which hit us when we tickled open the music icon was discovered to be a polite inquiry as to whether the media library required an update after we transferred content onto the device. The tracks stored within the 8GB storage space sidle neatly into categories like album, genre, artist, all music and so on.
All the stuff you hoard on the Zebronics Zebmate Cinema 4.3 shows up in the local disk which in turn floats out upon opening the music, video, ebook or photo option. But ‘cannot find media files’ is all that surfaces when you try to access something like images from the video icon or ebooks from the music widget. On the whole, listening to music on the portable entertainer was a very enjoyable experience. Those who love their radio stations may have trouble getting it to hunt down signals successfully though. We were soon moving on to the video playing capabilities of the device after blasting our ears out on a series of numbers from H.I.M, Linkin Park and Evanescence among others.
Videos were reeled out pretty decently on this portable entertainment offering and we found the facility colored up nicely with several useful alternatives in the settings corner. These covered options for enabling or disabling subtitles and redefining the image scale to default or 4:3 or 16:9. The .avi 720p movie we watched on the player moved along without any glitches or video stuttering problems and the color stays just as true in photo slideshows as it does in video content. The power on/off button comes to the rescue yet again while watching movies and when we were felt averse to tapping ‘Yes’ in answer to ‘play from breakpoint?’, this player just took the hint and carried on from where we left off. After two hours of watching a movie with the volume set to medium on the earphones, the battery life had only weakened by 40%.
When it comes to gadgets that use touchscreen interfaces, the type of display has a say in how much we love or hate them. The apt way of putting it is to say Zebronics’ latest media player arrives with a temperamental touchscreen. It’s not the worst we’ve seen in the market and using the stylus instead of a finger, we mean the index finger, is a far more practical manner of getting it to obey your whims. At the same time, it would have been really considerate if there was some sort of way to string the stylus with the device or a nook for stowing it in. Because we’ve learned that it could prevent users from having to retrieve the add-on from all sorts of unwelcome recesses or forgetting where they kept it through the course of this review.
This 121mm x 75mm x 13.7mm piece of work handles ebooks and photos in a predictable manner. It also extends three themes for the homescreen as well as options for picking PAL or NTSC TV output, tweaking power functions and checking up on the battery or remaining storage space. The total battery life can keep you going for almost five hours of heavy usage. To top it all, the UI is easily comprehensible and the PC-to-player content transferring process is a cinch.
Priced at Rs. 4,200, it’s not just the hoarding capacity of the Zebronics Zebmate Cinema 4.3 player which has doubled as compared to its cousin. It even looks twice as good as the Cinema 3.0, which puts its appearance at 4 on the ‘good looking media player’ scale that tops at 10. The video as well as music playing capabilities score well on our expectation levels and that’s essentially what a media player should be good at. Placing both Zebronics offerings side by side, the Zebmate Cinema 4.3 earns an extra point for all the enhancements it enjoys over the Zebmate Cinema 3.0. We reckon 8 out of 10 to be a fair rating for the Cinema 4.3.
