Melissa J. Perenson

Sonicblue Rio S50

A relatively large oval-shaped display (about 1.5 inches long) makes the Rio S50 easy to read, with or without the pale blue backlight on. The display conveniently shows song titles in a bigger, darker font near the top, with smaller clock and battery life icons above. Beneath that it shows the artist and album; a line illustrating the song's progress (useful for forward scanning within songs); and the format (MP3/WMA), bit rate, and recording mode (stereo/mono). A bar along the bottom shows the volume level. An equally large, compasslike rocker panel on the front of the Rio makes skipping though tracks or pausing play quick and simple. The Rio's bookmark feature is uncommon, and convenient if you like to jump to specific places within a favorite track (particularly useful for lengthy classical music or electronica tracks). A small, low-profile, manual switch turns the unit on and off--it's unlikely you'll pull the player out of your bag only to discover that the battery is dead because the player was accidentally switched on.
The headphone jack is bounded on either side by proprietary USB 1.1 inputs (cable included). If you misplace the cable, you'll need a replacement from Sonicblue in order to use the unit. Though you get a Secure Digital card slot, your storage expansion opportunities are not limitless, as the S50 supports only Secure Digital cards or MultiMediaCards up to 128MB. Furthermore, the slot is hidden within the battery well; we found in our tests that the SD card could be difficult to insert and remove without our also removing the battery. This unit has an FM tuner, but browsing through stations is extremely slow.
The S50 includes a clock and stopwatch. Compared with the controls on other players, the playback options (including shuffle, repeat, and an equalizer) are a bit buried in layered menus, which makes changing settings relatively slow. Just switching from digital music to radio takes several button presses. The equalizer is noteworthy, however: It has, in addition to six presets, a custom-adjustable five-channel equalizer. The earpiece headphones sounded fairly good, but you can greatly improve the sound with a better set. As for software, the unit comes with Rio Music Manager (required for transferring music), RealOne Player (suggested but not required for ripping and transferring music), and MoodLogic.
The sturdy S50 isn't as small as other flash players, but it has the best LCD we've seen, and it's relatively inexpensive for a player with a media slot.