Life! LXPI 4GB Digital Music Player

There are loads of digital media players on the market. Well now there’s another company we can add to the slew of media players out there on the market. But how does it stack up?

There are loads of digital media players on the market. Open up a catalogue for your local electronics store and you’ll literally be inundated with mp3 players, mp4 players, and so on and so on. Well now there’s another company we can add to the slew of media players out there on the market. But how does it stack up?

The Life! LXPI 4GB Digital Music Player is a new touchscreen music & video player from a brand not known for anything like this.

You might have heard of Life! before or seen their name when looking for iPod bags, docks, and all manner of accessories but an entrant into the media player arena is certainly something new from this company.

Measuring at almost 8 centimetres by almost five-and-a-half centimetres, the LXPI is a reasonably small player not much bigger than the iPod Nano. It’s a fair amount thicker at 15 millimetres, but is taken up mostly by a 2.4 inch touchscreen LCD. You could think of this as a smaller iPod Touch if you wanted.

Except for that it’s actually got quite a lot over the Touch as it features an SD slot for expandability and card reading capability, standard mini-USB port for ease of use and compatibility, and the ability to support almost every format you can think of.

You don’t need to convert to an AAC or MP4 format to get your multimedia to work on this device. Instead, just open up a transfer program like Winamp or Windows Media Player and transfer it directly.

The sound is surprisingly good as is the video playback, but things start to bad when you’re trying to use the LXPI.

For instance, while Life! have been generous and provided not just a bag, pair of decent in-ear earbuds, but also a stylus, this is the sort of mp3 player that you’ll probably use without grabbing the stylus and the interface just doesn’t respond to that well. The buttons for you to press are all the way on the side so you have to keep hitting the edge to move on to the next item.

There are also things that look like buttons at the bottom for options like shuffle, repeat, and equaliser settings, but you can’t actually change these by hitting them. It would have been nice if these were made to be buttons so you could change settings on the go, but what you’re actually forced to do is go back to the options every time you want to change your settings.

While the LXPI supports images, it takes ages to browse through the thumbnails as things like the scrollbar just don’t work intuitively.

At times, it feels like this player could do with a firmware upgrade and all of these problems would just disappear.

And that’s hopefully what will happen because with features like FM radio, a voice recorder, 45 hours of playback for audio and 6 for video, as well as a 2 year warranty right out of the box, the Life! LXPI digital music player has a lot going for it.

Product: Life! LXPI 4GB Digital Music Player

Vendor: Life!

RRP: $189 for the 4GB, $249 for the 8GB

Website: Life!

Reviewed by Leigh D. Stark

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