Product Reviews

The limitations of battery-power are all too clear to anyone who carries a portable gadget; mobile phone, digital camera, MP3 player, or, more probably, all three.

Stray more than a cable's length from a power socket for too long and you can say goodbye to your creature comforts. Baylis has long been trying to solve this problem in the developed world, as well as bringing powered gadgets to the developing world, with its range of wind-up devices. It started with a simple FM radio several years ago, and has since moved on to MP3 players and digital radios.

We reviewed the original Eco Media Player earlier this year, and the Revolution is the update to this portable audio and video player.

Unfortunately, and contrary to its name, this is far from a revolutionary update. The chassis retains the same dimensions as the original, but at least replaces the silver front and matte rubber back with glossy black plastic.

This is harder-wearing, and gives it a far more modern look - the original had more than a touch of camping-equipment chic to it that wasn't exactly attractive.

The buttons have also been revamped,

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too, but are all in the same locations. The block of five buttons on the centre has been replaced with a four-way switch and inset menu button, while the SD card slot and integrated light are also unmoved.

The torch light does take up slightly less room on the chassis than it did before, and is far brighter, but is still an inexplicable feature for a device targeted at the mainstream market. Storage space has been doubled to 4GB, but can still be easily and cheaply upgraded with an SD card.

The heart of the gadget, the wind-up mechanism, is relatively unchanged. A ring surrounding the handle lights up when charging, and is a nice new touch, but the ratio of time spent winding to time spent using is still not high enough; in tests we found that a minute of frantic cranking only gets you a song or two.

One useful addition is a small speaker on the rear of the player; it's not the loudest we've seen on a portable player, or of the highest quality, but is more than adequate for playing music among friends in a park, and gives the Revolution another trick with which to entice customers.

Aside from the purely cosmetic changes to the exterior, the software has been overhauled, too. One of the main drawbacks to the previous model was that the software was unintuitive and clunky, and unfortunately, although it has improved, the interface is still nowhere near as usable as the majority of traditional MP3 players on the market.

The quality of the software, combined with its large size and the effectiveness of the wind-up mechanism, all work to limit the practicality of the Revolution, especially considering that the iPod nano can be had for around the same price with double the storage capacity.