My six year old MP3 player just isn’t up to the job anymore and I have been looking for an alternative, on and off, over that last few weeks. Ideally I would have liked a portable music player that supported Ogg Vorbis but as my home cinema isn’t Ogg Vorbis compatible I decided to standardize on MP3. No flames please!

I have lots of MMC and SD memory cards that I have collected over the years so decided get a player which could make use of them. I only need a player for use in the gym and while cycling so it doesn’t need to be too fancy, with that in mind I decided to get the Sumvision XT105 MP3 Player which is super cheap and surprisingly good considering the price :-)

Initial impressions are that the manual was obviously translated from Chinese to English using Google, the included headphones are not much cop. That said, once you plug-in a decent set of head phones the sound reproduction is very good and more than good enough for what I want it for and although playlists aren’t supported playback by folder is. That player is very light and very small, so ideal for use in the gym and battery life is around 10-12 hours from a single AAA battery. It is also Linux compatible, although I have been using a USB card reader to populate my memory cards with MP3s as the XT105 is only USB 1.1 and therefore a bit slow. I am off to the gym now with some banging tunes.