Product: Rollei ea900/ea910 Mini Card MP3 players Price: 128MB $890; 256MB $1,290 Pros: Cheap, slim and elegant Cons: Less than intuitive user interface It seems almost every company wants to sell MP3 players. Rollei, the German company better known for its speciality cameras, has followed up on its ambition to expand into the digital audio player market with a sleek and inexpensive device that includes an unusual gimmick for an MP3 player - a pre-installed English-Chinese dictionary. For its second foray into the jungle of digital music players, Rollei seems to have got at least half of the equation right. The ea900/ea910 models, which come with 128?megabytes and 256MB of memory respectively, are not only among the least expensive MP3 players on the market, they are among the most elegant, with a slim metal case in red, silver or blue. Nor does the unit want for features. It has an FM radio, it can record voice dictation with crisp clarity and, of course, there is the English to Chinese dictionary. Sadly, the dictionary only lets you access a limited vocabulary on the large liquid-crystal display rather than listen to the pronunciation of the words through headphones. Moreover, where the unit does let Rollei down is in the clumsy user interface, which is accessed through a set of graceful metallic buttons and a plastic jog dial on the side of the machine. For example, the first unit that that we tested crashed because this humble writer could not figure out how to stop a voice recording. While there is clearly a 'rec' button on the right side of the machine, none is marked 'stop'. The only apparent option left was to turn off the device in the hope that all would be well when it was turned back on. Alas, it was not. Turning the unit on and off was also a bit of a labour, with redundant buttons needing to be hit.
