That reaction is created by the M:Robe MR100's looks, put simply its a stunner, a supermodel amongst MP3 players and this 5gb waif is winning the catwalk already but can it survive a full review?

At 52 x 90 x 14.9mm the M:Robe is no slob it's construction is 1st class with only the hold switch being made of plastic, the back of the unit is a coasted metal and the whole front is sleek glass which with its dark smoke looks very sleek indeed. Fire up your MR100 and the whole light show kicks in a kind of Blackpool illuminations meets Knightrider look and feel, the red backlit LCD screen is complimented by red touch screen controls.

Olympus have been bit stingy on the codec front with the Mr100 and it only supports MP3 and WMA, so no luck for the growing army of Ogg Vorbis fans and for anyone who wants to try WAV or ACC, still at least the MP3 replay right up to 320kbps.

The 5gb drive should be good for around 1100 MP3 tracks which is smack bang between the 2 different Ipod Mini versions, getting your tracks onto the M:Robe is accomplished via the USB 2.0 connection. However in their infinite wisdom Olympus have gone for a proprietary jack rather than a full size or mini USB socket, this connection is also used to charge the lithium Ion battery.

Controlling the mRobe MR100 is a mixed affair, with a very sensitive touch slider similar to that employed by the creative Zen micro but all hidden behind the front sheet of glass. This works remarkably well if not perhaps a little too sensitive, however the controls are not exactly intuitive and the menu system is limited to 5 items on the deep red screen at any one time.

Depending on the light source it can be tricky to read the red on darker red display, you really need the backlight on all the time in order to clearly see what's going on. However this eats the already stretched battery, our tests struggled to get 8 hours out of the Mr100 and less if we used a lot of backlight.

Sonically the M:Robe does perform well with an accurate reproduction of the tracks, a weird thing is the supplied headphones they are cheap but not too bad at reproducing the bass required, what puzzled us was the right angled connector.

That's when we realised that the side mounted jack would really damage any headsets you use that have a straight 3.5mm jack, our Shure E2C's were fine again with a 90 degree connector, but the Sennheiser plug got bent out of shape within hours.

As with most MP3 players Olympus supply some software to help you rip CD's and fill up your M:Robe, its a bog standard type of application and the rip and sort works fine, however there is no drag and drop function plus the only way to fill up the 5gb disk is via a sync feature. The problem here was we have 23gb of music and the software tried to put the whole lot on the MR100!

You'd think it would be easy to tell it only to fill up to the maximum 5gb, but no unlike the Ipod shuffle there is no easy way to select what gets moved over and what doesn't, in fact its done by excluding things rather than including items to sync.

Priced at £169 we expected a lot more from the M:Robe MR100, there are few extras and the basic functions aren't that easy to use, this is a device for the style conscious not for those who really use MP3 players for daily commuters or for those with large collections.

Published - 16/05/2005

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