As the competition increases in the world of portable audio players, we are seeing lots of improvements and features on these gadgets. Every manufacturer tries to do something that will make their player unique from the rest. X-Micro, a name not known to many and a rather small member of the MP3 player market, has filled its EVA line of portable audio players with lots of features.

We will take a look at X-Micro's EVA 256MB portable audio player in this analysis. This particular player has built-in voice recording capabilities, it can be used as a flash drive, it can play songs, and it has built-in FM tuner functionality. All of these features are built into this small-sized player, but we are a little skeptical as to how each feature will perform on its own as it is a known fact that a hybrid product does not tend to excel in either one of its numerous features. Having said that, more and more manufacturers with hybrid product lines are taking each functionality of the product with care to make sure the consumers are satisfied with the overall performance. Perhaps one of the influential improvements in the hybrid product industry are the "All-in-one" printer/fax/copier machines. At one point in time, many users stayed away from such products as the performance from all aspects of the printer was horrible, but now these machines make an attractive option to potential buyers.

We will closely analyze all the features of the EVA portable audio player and see where X-Micro stands in the market. How does this MP3 player differ from its competitors? Read on and find out...

Accessories:

It is common to see manufacturers provide everything in the package, as it is one of the purchasing decisions for the buyer, considering the amount of similarities and performance closeness between different products. The EVA portable audio player comes with an USB connection cable, a driver CD, a FM earphone, an user's guide, one triple A (AAA) battery, and a neck brace.

Everything else is self-explanitory, however, we must admit that the user's guide that comes in the package is one of the thickest we have seen in a long time. We usually encounter either fold-out pamphlets or small user's guides with various products and it was surprising to see how much time and effort X-Micro put into the user's manual alone.

The next thing we found to be interesting was the FM earphone; the FM tuner is built-in the earphones as you can see from the image above. The FM tuner looks like a saucer disc with "Scan", "On/Off", and "Reset" buttons at the top. The downside of having the FM tuner on the earphones is that if you decide to use alternative earphones, you will be left without the FM tuner. This is understandable on X-Micro's part seeing as they were probably intending to reduce the clutter on the player itself, but they could've adopted iRock's method by integrating the FM tuner as an option in the player menu. We will see how the FM tuner performs later in this analysis and if having it on the earphones makes a difference in overall performance.

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