Design
At first blush, the solid, stainless-steel MPIO looks like a silver version of the Apple iPod. Roughly the same size and weight (60 × 17 x 104mm, 159 grams) as the reigning MP3 champ, the HD300 features a mirrored face that's easily smudged by fingerprints; a square, 1.5-inch LCD; a diamond-shaped touch pad; and a tiny hole in the right-hand corner that acts as both the built-in mic and the Reset button. Sitting on the top end of the player is the headphone/line-in recording minijack, a hold slider, a mini USB port, and a DC power connector. We were impressed by the sturdy look and feel of the HD300 -- until we noticed that the two main screws holding together the case were coming loose. Quality control, anyone?
Navigating the MPIO HD300's menus is easy if you're familiar with the iPod; you just press Enter on the touch pad to select a menu item or Menu to backtrack. However, instead of an iPod-like scrollwheel, there's a 1.5-inch vertical indentation that you swipe with your fingertip. This touch-sensitive slider works well enough, but we had to swipe repeatedly to scroll through long lists of songs, and sometimes it was tricky to zero in on the exact title we wanted. Way to be different, MPIO, but let's face it: either a scrollwheel or a jog dial would have been much easier to use.
The HD300's 2-inch, eight-line LCD does a solid, if not eye-popping job. In playback mode, the display shows album, artist, and track info; time elapsed/remaining; and EQ mode. You also have the option of displaying track number/total tracks, as well as bit rate, sampling rate, and file type. Conspicuously absent, however, is a graphic equaliser, a seeming no-brainer, considering the screen size and resolution.
Also included in the package is a USB cable (which, unfortunately, won't charge the battery when plugged into a PC), an AC power cord, a line-in cable with minijacks on either end, a pair of earbuds, and a white plastic holster.
Features
Setting up the MPIO HD300 couldn't be easier; just connect the player to your PC's or Mac's USB port, and the device should show up as a drive letter in Windows Explorer or a removable drive in Mac OS X. Adding music to the MPIO is a simple matter of dragging and dropping, but remember to append your filenames with numbers, or your songs will play in alphabetical order. PC users can then filter the music on the player with the MPIO Utility on the included CD for browsing by artist, album, genre, or title. The utility will also format the player and check for firmware updates. There's no standalone music manager, but a plug-in for Windows Media Player is included.
The HD300 plays a decent range of file formats, including MP3, unprotected WMA, OGG, WAV, ASF, and M3U playlist files. You can also juice the sound using one of the several EQ presets (such as Pop, Rock, Jazz, Classic, Vocal, and a user-defined setting) or a sonic effect, such as the simulated-surround SRS mode, the boomy TruBass, or WOW, which combines the two effects. We like the MPIO's auto-resume feature, which picks up your music where you left off after powering off the player, but we wish there was a way to scan through a song using the touch pad, àla "scrubbing" on the iPod, especially given the iPod-like progress bar on the display.
Performance
We were very happy with the sound quality on the MPIO HD300; our music sounded loud and clear at 20Hz to 20KHz and 90dB, with thumping bass (especially with TruBass activated) and plenty of detail on the high end. The included earbuds sounded only fair; we recommend you swap them out with a better set.
FM and line-in recordings were excellent. We cranked up the volume on our audio source for the line-in test and couldn't detect any distortion or clipping.
MPIO promises 16 hours of battery life from the rechargeable lithium-polymer battery. CNET Labs was able to get only 12.9 hours, which isn't horrible but not as good as advertised. Transfer times were wickedly fast over USB 2.0 at 12.7MB per second.
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