Kingston Technology, more famous for its memory and storage solutions makes a foray into the PMP market with a small compact player called as the K-PEX100 (Portable Entertainment Experience). The K-PEX100 comes in two storage capacities; 1GB and 2GB. The K-PEX series is not an iPod competitor but it does give value for money when your pocket is tight and want all the features in your player.
Packaged Contents:
The player comes with a USB 2.0 cable, earphones, USB host cable, transcoder CD (for converting videos), a lanyard, a protective cover and a user manual.
Appearance:
The unit is small and pretty lightweight too. Initial impression of it will be that of a gaming handheld rather than a PMP. The buttons are ergonomically placed and has a decent 2-inch TFT LCD screen. The backside has a loudspeaker integrated. Volume, recording, repeat and mode buttons are placed at the sides, so as not to clutter the front side. The remaining two sides are reserved for a USB and miniSD card slot.
Startup:
The K-PEX100 is a breeze to use and you don’t really require to refer to the user manual. It takes around 2-3 seconds to boot up and you’re ready to rock and roll.
Music:
On the music front, it can play MP3, WMA, OGG and WAV files. We inserted the bundled earphones and the quality was great. However, prolonged music hours could give you a hurting ear. If you want more soothing experience try to get another pair of quality earphones. We tried it with iPod and Samsung YP-K5’s earphones and it was a terrific experience giving us no hurting ears and awesome music quality. On the other hand, the loudspeaker is damper. High volume on a loudspeaker is a thing to avoid.
The FM Radio is another useful addon, if you want to catch up some news or music. FM is only activated when earphones are attached to it. Some of the flaws here are: there is no loudspeaker support here and you cannot record songs from the FM.
Games:
There were two games pre-installed, Star Fighter and Battle Armor. Both the games aren’t much to boast about and you won’t get any real enjoyment unless you want to kill time.
Text & Images:
For the text, only *.txt files are supported. To read a text file on this player can be a herculean task if the file has many words. The formatting of the file goes haywire which will surely abstain you to read further. The image format supported is only JPEG. The viewable quality is great, but to open up an image can be time consuming which depends on the resolution of the picture.
Video:
To play a video, the source file needs to be converted to the MPX format first. This may sound some boring task for lazy people but its way too easy converting from the bundled software. The video playback quality was above our expectations as it played a DVD transcoded movie without any glitches.
Other Features:
K-PEX100 is not just a PMP. It can also be used as a mass storage device and also features a USB host. It means that you can transfer files on the go without the use of PC. Just plug a USB gadget with its cable attached to the K-PEX’s host cable. The player will detect it if other gadget does not suck more juice than what K-PEX can offer.
Final Note:
The audio playback time suggested is 17 hours on a fully charged battery. But in our test, it came to about 10 hours of audio playback with around 1 hour of video playback. However, if you’re an audiophile, you can surely touch the 15 hour playback mark. Priced at just around $100 for a 1GB model and packed with numerous features, it surely makes a perfect gift for this Christmas.
Get yours now from Amazon for $99.
2-3 seconds to boot up? that’d be great, but it seems like other reviews says ~25 seconds. :/
Our player was just 400MB full. Maybe that was the reason it booted really fast.