Latte Communications Ice 2 GB Video MP3 Player (Silver)

I was extremely disappointed with this product. Within a month of having it, the only way it would turn on was if it was plugged into the wall. I returned it to Amazon, which was very very easy and received a replacement by the next day. After only having that one for one day the screen no longer would display anything accept a big streak and a huge dark area all around it. I figured on maybe getting a bad one the first time around, but getting another bad one after that - I have to say I would not recommend the Ice. Oh, and try calling the company that makes them - a COMPLETE joke!! I called 4 different times, was placed on hold for over 20 minutes each time, with absolutely no luck of getting a person. I got tired of holding and sent them an email message, which took another day for a response. Also, try connecting to their tech support line, you will immediately be disconnected.

The Latte Ice 2GB player, a rebadged Ramos RM750 Rockchip-based DAP, offers many features at an attractive price. Sadly, it performs none of them very well. It's a case of death by a thousand cuts - no drawback is a showstopper, but the sheer volume of them weigh heavily on the user's day-to-day experience. It's not quite the Yugo of DAPs, but in this case you get what you pay for.

To begin with the screen, it is a pleasant size at 2.8" and bigger than many other DAPs'. However, you'll notice that there's no information given on the number of colors the screen can display. Be assured that it's not 16 million; Latte claims 260K. The reason you should care about how many colors a screen can display is that a low color depth can lead to "smudgy" artifacts being displayed, especially in areas where the color is rather uniform, like a blue sky or a dark night (e.g., there aren't enough colors available to display the gradual change in hue from close to the sun to farther away, or from directly under a streetlight at night to the dark corners). I've watched more than a dozen tv episodes and documentaries on the Ice, and can testify that this periodic artifact of low color depth can be very distracting. You end up with smudgy halos around light sources, blotches in what should be uniform backgrounds, etc.

Another issue with the screen is that it is not very bright or glare resistant. You can forget about watching video outdoors, often even as a daytime passenger in a car with the brightness cranked up all the way. The screen fades out almost completely in bright conditions.

Moving on to the video quality, the specs of the player are rather optimistic (a disturbing pattern with this player). It's claimed that it can play at 24fps (frames per second), which is the speed of film. It CAN, but users of the Ice or other players based on the chip inside it will tell you that it can't do so without losing sync with the audio. Even 22fps can be too much depending on the bitrate. It's telling that if you use the included video file conversion software and convert at it's top quality setting of "high", the video is created at 533kbps video, 128 kbps audio, and only 20fps. It's not like watching stop-motion animation, but it's not what's promised, either.

File transfer speed is another disappointing area. The product claims to be "USB 2.0 full speed", but this is misleading. It is USB 2.0 *compatible* - as is any other USB 1.1 device. There is no "USB hi-speed" logo on the box, and this is because it can't transfer at real USB 2.0 speeds. USB 2.0 full speed is the name for the compatibility mode with the faster of the two old USB 1.1 settings. It is considerably slower than USB 2.0 hi speed (12Mbps vs. 480 Mbps!). I didn't need the diagnostic tool I used to tell me this though; it was painfully clear when I began copying files over to the device that it was no faster than the USB 1.1 device it was replacing for me. My $10 1GB *real* USB 2.0 drive benchmarks several times faster at reading and writing than the Latte Ice.

More specification-confusion is encountered when we get to the memory card slot on the device. It is very nice to find in a device at this price-point, even if it is only SD, not SDHC, compatible (this limits the capacity of the cards you can use to 2GB). I haven't tested the memory card performance of the Ice yet because I can't figure out what kind of memory card it takes. Looking at the description here on Amazon, you'll see the card slot labelled as Micro SD. Check Latte's site, though, and you'll see it called Mini SD - in most places. Check some of the included documentation and you'll see it referred to as either one. For those who aren't familiar with this, MicroSD cards are about half the size of MiniSD cards. I figured I'd clear this up by sending off an e-mail to Latte. I will credit them with a reasonably prompt reply. The problem was that I was told that MicroSD and MiniSD "are the same thing". *Sure* they are - if you think you can fit a laserdisk in your DVD player or an LP record in your CD player. The responder pointed out that Latte sells MicroSD cards with a set of MiniSD and SD adaptors. Buying that would guarantee that it would work in my Ice - but that doesn't answer the question about the *actual* size card the Ice can handle, or help me if I want to buy a memory card at my local Best Buy rather than order it along with a full complement of adaptors from Latte across the country. Since their e-mail support was (frighteningly) no help, I'm going to have to find someone with a MiniSD card we can test on the device. I've found one source that lists the Ramos RM750 (should be the same as the Latte Ice) as having a MiniSD slot, and that's what the label on the back of the device says it is.

Yet another quibble with the Ice is the order in which files are played. The Ice doesn't appear to read ID3 tags (despite Latte claiming it supports ID3 1.0), so you have no option to sort your music by artist, genre, etc. Ok, I've seen this on other players in that the music hierarchy is solely folder-based. But here's where we get into sorry territory again - the Ice doesn't even display files in *alphabetical order*. Folders and files appear *in the order they were copied onto the device*. If you have folders for each artist and album and you're regularly swapping albums on and off the device (which will be pain enough given the USB 1.1 speed), pretty soon your folder order is going to be a mess and you'll need to scroll through the complete list to find what you're looking for. It's no fun scrolling though a list of twenty artist folders that aren't in alphabetical order. It also doesn't matter if you have your tracks numbered 01, 02, 03, etc. - they could very well be displayed and played 03, 02, 01 if that's the order your file explorer copied them over in. Really, there's no excuse for it and this is the only player I've personally encountered that doesn't sort files by even alphabetical order. The Ice has several of these "You've got to be kidding me!" moments as you spend time with it.

A lot about the Ice could be characterized by what it doesn't do - which is a great many things now considered standard for digital audio players. The inability to sort your music by ID3 tag was covered, but the Ice can't even *display* ID3 tag info (again, Latte - how does it "support" ID3?). Its screen while the music is playing shows the folder name and the actual file name to identify your music. Want album art on your 2.8" screen? Sorry. There's a giant equalizer display, the file bitrate, how many songs are on the whole unit, the EQ setting, whether it's set to repeat songs/folders or not, and that's about it other than the time elapsed/remaining in the song. Want to create a playlist on the player? Nope. Want to play songs via a playlist you created *off* the player? Can't even do that. You play songs via the file hierarchy, period, which is based in part on the order you copied the folders onto the player. Want music bookmarks? The player will remember the last song playing, but not where you were in that song, so upon resuming play, it starts from the beginning. In other words, forget about audiobooks. Want video bookmarks? No can do. Oddly enough, you can create up to three bookmarks in a displayed *text file*, but not in audio or video files. Say it with me - you've got to be kidding me! The Ice is far from an e-book reader! Want the files in flash memory and on your SD card (whatever size it may be) displayed together? Nope - flash memory and card memory folder hierarchies are separate. It has a speaker to its credit (a feature I believe ought to be mandatory on most DAPs, at least ones that play video), but it's located on the back of the unit, which naturally lowers volume. In fact, even the microphone is located on the back of the unit (?!?). Again... you've got to be kidding me!

Build quality does not seem very sturdy, and pressing hard on buttons can distort the LCD. The buttons themselves are not very responsive, and sometimes need to be pressed directly in the center or two or three times before they respond. The battery level indication only has three states, green, yellow and red. It seems to leave green extremely rapidly after beginning use after a full charge, and spends most of its operating time in the yellow zone, which isn't very helpful as a gauge of battery life. I've never let the battery run down all the way, so I can't say how much leeway one has between when it goes red and when it goes dead. The battery life is another "You've got to be kidding me!" item, though. Let's look at some other players for a moment - the Samsung P2 is almost the same size as the Ice. It's life is 5 hours of video, 35 hours of audio. The iRiver Spinn has 5 hours of video, 25 hours of audio. The expensive Archos 605 WiFi has a hard drive (needs more power than flash memory) and a giant 4.3" screen and Wifi and even that can get 5.5 hours of video and 17 hours of audio per charge. The Cowon D2 is thicker but about half the width of the Ice while still packing a 16 million color 2.5" screen and gets an amazing 10 hours of video and 52 hours of audio! The Ice, according to Latte's own site, gets 3-4 hours of video and an AMAZINGLY poor 6-8 hours of audio (although the manual claims "about 15", which is still sub-par)! That's so far below what every other flash player out there today offers that's it's not funny. Even smaller, slimmer players get much better audio life than the Ice, with the same-size P2 getting more than double, assuming the better of the two listed audio ratings. Don't expect to take it away for the weekend on one charge. And as you can see, don't expect to have a clue about the actual specs of the player after checking out the seller's website or the product manual either.

To sum up, on the one hand, the Ice does offer a lot for the money: 2.8" screen, microphone, speaker, radio, card slot, video. However, the cons detract from each of the pros: poor screen performance, awkwardly placed microphone and speaker, low bitrate/fps playback, pathetic battery life, miserable user interface with several ridiculous annoyances, lack of playlists, bookmarks, poor radio reception with no presets or auto-scan, and the fact one has no clue what type of SD card fits in the player, other than the fact that you're limited in that it's not SDHC, which are up to at least 8GB.

If you're looking for a player that can do several things at a very cheap price, the Latte Ice can be considered as long as you're prepared to deal with 1,000 minor gripes and pains in the neck, don't mind waiting a long time to upload files, and won't be away from power for more than a few hours at a time and if watching video will be doing it in a non-bright area. Otherwise, for a little more money, you can get something that offers many of the same features, plus others, without all the compromises. For twice the price of this model, you can get a Cowon D2 with twice the storage capacity (4GB), 16 million color touchscreen, much better support for different audio/video formats, an SDHC slot, tv out, ID3 browsing, etc. at the expense of a speaker. Best Buy/Insignia and Sansa also have some very nice, cheap players out. It's my opinion that for a few ten-dollar bills more, you can do much better than the Latte Ice without having to settle.

This is an awesome little gadget which does what it says it does without the fancy extras, but with a nice sharp display screen and good audio, enclosed in sturdy metal casing rather than the cheap plasticy stuff. Very simple to use, only draw back is that you have to use the included software to compress videos as it does not recognize vids created in other software. uploading files is a breeze; no complicated interface like some vid players. When you plug it into the USB on your computer, your computer sees it as a simple USB flash drive, you just drag the files you like into it and you are done! The player automatically distinguishes between vids, music, and other files which also a great plus. And the price is great as well.