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Features
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One of the best features of the Rio Karma is the
included docking station, something my Jukebox Zen did not support. Not only does it add additional features, but
it also will appeal to the case modding community. The clear plastic
housing sports some blue LED's to enhance its overall great looks. On
the rear, you'll find two RCA output jacks that will allow you to connect your
Karma to any stereo our audio component with RCA input jacks. In
addition, it includes a LAN jack that will allow you to not only sync or
connect your device, but also make your Karma serve as a network MP3 drive and
transfer content between multiple machines.
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A shot of Karma docked and powered to
demonstrate the embedded blue LED's. Overall, the LED's were a nice touch
and compliment most modern setups available today.
Storage
Due to the Karma's unique shape and size, you're
probably wondering what type of hard drive is being used by this device.
Obviously, it cannot be a mircodrive because of the shear capacity of the
drive. The Karma uses a Hitachi Travelstar C4K40 1.8" hard disk drive.
Its rotational speed is rated at 4200RPM. These small, high capacity
1.8" drives are not readily used by many devices and you may have a hard time
finding a replacement or the higher capacity 40GB drive that Hitachi claims to
make as well. It takes approximately only 5 seconds to load the
interface. That's slightly faster than the Jukebox Zen (Firewire).
Interface
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The Rio Karma has one of the most powerful and
feature-rich interfaces found on a hard drive MP3 player. Unlike the
Nomad Jukebox Zen, it features a large 160x128 backlit LCD display with large
bold fonts that's easy on the eyes. Its user-friendly interface has many
great playback features such as Dynamic Playlist Generation and a unique
Auto-DJ feature that we will be showing you throughout this review.
I can't possibly go over all the menus as there are too many, but I will try to
cover as much as possible. While it was quite difficult to depict these in pictures, I've done my best
with the images.
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The Play Music menu will allow you to browse
your collection by either artist, album, track, playlist, genre or year.
Here is where you'll find the Auto DJ feature which will be be showing to you a bit later.
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The interface on the Rio Karma was designed to
quickly browse through your entire collection with minimal scrolling.
How is this done? Well, unlike the Jukebox Zen, the Karma basically uses
a different method for browsing. Think of it as subdirectories. As
shown on the sample pictures above, if browsing by artist, you'll begin by
browsing an alphabetized list. Once you get the the letter of the artist
you are looking for, you'll press the wheel one time to access the
subdirectory of all artists under that particular letter. This is a much
more efficient way of browsing a large collection of music files and I
definitely prefer it over the method used by the Jukebox Zen.
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