Measuring 81 x 43 x 12mm the Oracom UB-890 is a small and stylish device which despite its relatively low price feels well built and substantial while very light in the pocket. The large 2" 262k colour screen takes up most of the front panel with a collection of controls to the right mainly the 4 way pad which is extremely sensitive to touch, the upper edge houses a menu key, record button and power / hold slider.

The rear of the device houses 2 (stereo) speakers which manage to put out a respectable volume level in excess of many so called music Smartphones and it only distorts when you get a level of 35 out of 40. The lower edge contain the main connectors, earphones, microphone and a custom Oracom plug which with the leads supplied provides USB 2.0 connectivity. Our review unit arrived empty and so we needed to get plenty of media onto it for testing, having attached the customer Oracom lead to the lower edge of the UB890 and the USB plug to our host PC we waited for the unit to be recognised but nothing happened. In fact the Oracom unit managed to freeze our test PC numerous times and so we switched to a laptop and after several attempts the Oracoms screen finally lit up with USB in large letters and we were able to transfer media over to the folder structure using windows explorer.

We did wonder if the USB host function was causing the problem, it is possible for the Oracom to act as a host so that you can plug in dumb USB devices like a pen driver or digital camera and suck media from them onto the UB890. However this function needs to be switched on and we tested this and it worked just fine, it seems that the USB connection for standard media upload is just a bit flaky.

With media now on board the Oracom, we started with the audio playback features which support MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV audio formats. Navigation is via a folder structure or hierarchy which is inherited from where you place your media on transfer, this is fairly basic but does work well, the controls are hyper sensitive and a bit tricky to use as there is no tactile feedback and hitting the centre button is very difficult unless you have very slim fingers. As a precaution you'll need to use the hold button all the time to stop accidental key presses.

Playback is really quite good and with a cheap but effective set of earphones plugged in there is a good amount of bass and clarity from the little Oracom, sound is comparable with most of the mid sized MP3 players and most of those do not have the range of file support of the UB890. On screen you get a little graphic equalizer, the full track title, artists and plenty of information about what is playing, changing tracks is a bit fiddly with the red backlit controls and can lead to re starting the current song or miss-selection. A nice feature is midtrack resume which means you can pause an ebook and power down then power up again and carry on where you left off.

From audio we move swiftly to video and the Oracoms support for MPEG, AVI, WMV, ASF, well not really support it's more that the provided software CD that contains the media elinker programme will transcode these formats to the internal format of the Oracom. This is does but slowly and annoyingly rather than support a native format like Windows media or MPEG-4. We did push over one file which displayed and played fine but the process more than put us off trying anymore and rather ruins the idea of using the 2gb of memory to hold any video files.

The Oracom range does go up to a bigger 4gb model but on test we had the mid range 2gb model which should be good for a weeks worth of commuting and it does help keep the price down too. As with many devices that try to challenge in Apple Nano territory the Oracom does so by adding more features than you can shake a mini PMP stick at.

There is an FM tuner that you can both use on the move and record from, a voice recorder and line in recorder, picture viewer a few games even a visualisation software to make sexy patterns on screen while playing audio tracks. Yes the Oracom UB-890 has everything expect the kitchen sink and we hear they are working on that as a firmware upgrade. But all of these extra gizmos take their toll on the battery life and audio playback has a disappointing maximum of 13 hours continuous playback with that dropping to under 8 hours if you play video. Charging is via the USB connector which seems far more reliable than transferring media.

All in all a nice little player at just 55 grams and £99, 2gb of multi format music storage which with a large screen should be a real winner, sadly the sensitive controls and unreliable USB connection mean that for us it was just too much of a fight compared to an iPod Nano or Sandisk model.

Published - 29/10/2006

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