The Rio Chiba is a pocket-sized MP3 player with a lot of useful extra features that could make it indispensable to your digital music listening. The basic player offers you 256MB of storage, but the Chiba has the big advantage of allowing you to expand capacity up to 1GB via the expansion memory slot and SD or MMC memory cards.
So, this player really can grow with you. The player supports both MP3s and WMAs and, even at the basic 256MB, you can store up to 120 tracks on the device.
Rio has made sure that this small player is full of advantages; you don’t just get an MP3 player here but an FM tuner, back-lit LCD display and a 5 band adjustable equalizer so you can listen to your music the way you like it (or go with the presets if that’s what you prefer)! There’s even a built-in stopwatch and lap timer on board. And, you’ll get up to 18 hours of use with the Chiba out of one standard AAA battery.
Rio has come up with a great chunky design for the Chiba - it’s compact and it looks good. The display is clear and the menus are incredibly simple to use. It certainly won’t take long to master what you can do with this player and the main "joystick" control is a great navigation tool. And, because it a flash-based player you won’t have those skipping issues which can be a such a headache with a lot of portable music devices.
These players come with a special carry case and belt clip, a pair of Sennheiser earbuds, an AAA battery, USB cable, installation disk and a quick start guide. You’ll also get the Rio software package which will help you manage and transfer your digital music. General accessories on offer include memory cards. If you shop around online you can be lucky and find this player at just over the $100 mark. There are plenty of refurbished bargains on offer for the Chiba as well which could get you bigger discounts.
Pros:
- Size/Design - The Rio Chiba is small yet robust, you won’t have any problems fitting it into your pocket and it should be fine if it falls out!
- Sound Quality - The player does real well on audio quality in a lot of reviews.
- Expansion - It's always useful to have the ability to boost your storage capacity, with extra memory cards you can add up to 1GB of memory.
- FM Tuner - Unlike many comparable players, the Chiba comes with a built-in FM tuner (and a stopwatch/timer!).
- Sennheiser Earbuds - The player comes with Sennheiser earbuds - Sennheiser are a leading headphones manufacturer so this is a real bonus.
- Case/Belt Clip - If you like music on the move the case/belt clip will suit you down to the ground.
- Skipping - The Chiba is flash-based so you won’t have to put up with skipping making this an ideal choice for sports players.
Cons:
- Track Numbers - If you want to play music tracks in a specific order (i.e. in sequence like a CD) then you have to make sure that you edit track tags otherwise the player won’t do this automatically.
- Construction - Some users have reported problems with the battery case ‘door’ which can sometime fall off too easily.
- Rio Software - This will be a personal thing for you but some users don’t like the software that comes with the player as it can have limited functionality.
Usage Tips and Tricks
You can basically avoid a lot of the reported problems with the battery door casing by simply being careful how you close it and by keeping the player in its case whenever you can. Some users have reported that the casing breaks if you drop the player(!) but this shouldn’t be so much of an issue if the case is there to give it some extra protection. Or you could just try not to drop it in the first place!Some users have reported that the Rio software has problems recognizing some music tracks on computers. One general tip here is to try Windows Media Player as an alternative if this is an issue. This seems to work for a lot of people.