Netac was not a brand we were familiar with when the chaps at Advanced MP3 offered us a sample unit and so we had little idea what to expect. The first signs were not too bad but the unit did come in that killer shrink wrap which always tries to sever an artery during the process of opening. Having extracted the player from the packaging we needed to give it a full charge. The base contains a small USB connector but a non standard one thus you will have to use the supplied lead, the connector is under a small plastic flap which didn't fully move back making it a tight fit to get the cable hooked up.

Once connected the host recognises the A200 as a mass storage device and the screen helpfully prompts that the player should be switched to hold mode if you want it to charge. Alternately the unit will remain powered up (not charging) and you can transfer media via USB.

Once fully charged we were able to start playing with the Netac, its large 1.8" OLED full colour screen takes up most of the front of the device, leaving a small area which contains that play / pause button. All the other controls are mounted on the edges with the skip and back buttons one side and volume and mode controls the other. Power up and get past the overly energetic welcome screens and you soon see that the menus are orientated in portrait mode which leads you to operate it with the selection button under your right thumb. The upper skip buttons serve to navigate through the menu structure and the play button acts as a select tool, the back button does as its name suggests.

The menus scroll through Music/Video/Photo/ebook/FM/Recorder/file and set-up each is accessed in the same way and the media folders use a basic folder structure to hold music and video, you simply drill down and select the tracks you want. Netac is limited in what audio formats you can play, these are MP3, WMA and WAVE, no ACC or Ogg Vorbis so no Mac fans of Linux chaps for this player! However it does support ID3 tags and on the whole we found played very reliably, we were however unable to transfer any play lists which was a pain and there is no mechanism for creating them on the player either.

Audio quality wasn't too bad from the small A200, across a range of tracks using our test Shure E2C's it sounded pretty good, the top end was tight and a bit breathy and the lower end was possibly a little distorted on some Amy Winehouse tracks but not bad for a sub £70 player. Use the supplied earphones and you may have a different opinion, apart from being hellishly uncomfortable after about 45 minutes use they also manage to make everything sound mushy and cheap, quite an accomplishment.

Video is a strange experience on the 1.8" screen, we managed to move over a short clip and while it played smoothly the screen is just too small for anything more than novelty value. The same goes for the photo viewer which can show JPEG and bitmap images, while all works fine it is of limited value. The ebook reader was an almost surreal experience, quite who would read and ebook on an MP3 player is a point lost on us and the A200 and an ebook is like using a typewriter through a magnifying glass.

The killer feature of the Netac A200 is the FM transmitter, yes it can receive FM radio but this device can also transmit. Combined with the UK governments decision to lift the daft ban on very low power FM transmissions you can now legally use FM to get the audio out of an MP3 player into your car radio. There is a huge range of aftermarket kits for the iPod and other players but very few players have one built in. The Netac has a button which switches the audio output from the headphone socket to an FM broadcast, it can also be tuned throughout the FM range to transmit on a quiet bit of FM spectrum so it doesn't have to fight with normal stations.

We set-up the player in car and tuned to a quiet bit of FM down near radio 2, soon the sound of the killers came piped out of the car stereo but fully controlled from the Netac. Audio quality isn't really CD like but it's not that bad and is comparable to playing an MP3 CD as many newer car head units are capable of. Like many of the after market FM transmitters it does have a few pops and whistles as reception varies and so it's not a perfect experience and we would compare it with listening to a local radio station as you start to drive out of the county. Of course the transmit function is pretty hard on the lithium ion battery and would soon drain it after a few hours use, so they have thought to include a 12 volt car charging lead with the package.

Priced at just £69 you do get a lot for your cash with the Netac A200, a 2gb player with OLED colour screen, FM transmitter and they even see fit to include a car charger. Overall the value manages to outweigh the shortcomings of some of the features, if you can live with less than perfection you can get a lot of features in a very small player.

Published - 14/04/2007

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