Yet another mp3 player

I last wrote on this topic at the end of August, exactly five months ago, saying "I have ordered yet another player from Ebay but this has yet to arrive so I can't comment on it". The player is a 4MB Ruizo: it has both internal memory and can accept a memory card. So loading this player simply involved me extracting the SD card from the Sansa Clip and inserting it into this player.

The good points of this player: it seems to run forever without being charged and it has a good sound. More importantly, it continues playing from exactly where it was when it was turned off, so theoretically this is the perfect mp3 player.

Why am I less than enthusiastic? The 'user interface' is extremely badly designed, seeming to me non-intuitive and inconsistent. When scrolling though a list, it seems obvious (to me, at least) to use the up and down arrows, but the interface requires using the left and right arrows. Every menu option seems to use the arrow keys in a different manner. Changing the volume is likely to succeed 50% of the time; the other 50% will do something random. I only discovered the 'continue playing from the same place' by serendipity a few weeks ago.

Another small but important point: the Sansa Clip had, as its name suggests, a clip which allows the player to be clipped on to a piece of clothing or to a belt. The Ruizo has a hole at the top which allows a lanyard (a piece of cord) to be attached; presumably this lanyard is then supposed to go around one's neck allowing the player to be like a medal. This is unsatisfactory. After thinking about this for a while, I realised that I can use a key chain - treat the player as a key, then hang the chain on my belt.

Since then I have ceased to use any of the player's options. I turn the player on - it starts from where it stopped previously. When I finish, I press on the round button in the middle for a long time (a few seconds). If I am lucky, there will appear on the screen 1 2 3; I continue to press on the round button until these figures disappear,  to be replaced by 'Bye bye'. I then turn off the player with the on/off switch. 

These simple operations give me what I need. Anything else is liable to pick a random song, or one which is much earlier in the playlist. As I have over a thousand songs on the card, I haven't got to the end yet, so I don't know whether the list will 'wrap around' and start again from the beginning. I'm not even sure if the songs are being played from the card or from internal memory; at one time I tried to set up a play list, but this seemed to play only songs from internal memory so I copied as many songs as I could from the card to the memory.

If it weren't for these interface problems, this would be an excellent player. A set of instructions came with the player, but these were largely incomprehensible, and as I wrote earlier, key usage is inconsistent. At the moment, this is the best player which I have, but it needs improvement.