Sumvision Aqua

This product also masquerades as the GigaView 3.5 and the Rimax Alum TVIX. Given that the Rimax plays WMA and OGG too, I'm not sure if the software is subject to the same flaws, but here's the review for the SumVision Aqua:

First off, let me get the positives out of the way - a sort of ""do the easy/quick jobs first"" kind of thing.
Erm.
It's quite a good looking device on the outside, you get spare screws for when you lose the tiddly ones in the carpet. You get a remote, with batteries, and all the cables necessary to use the device. The cardboard box has a nice feel to the finish. The device is reasonably compact. The device plays all the formats it says it does on the tin, and so far I havent had the software freeze or fail to play something.

I bought this product because it was cheap, I needed an HD enclosure, a card reader and I thought the media player be a useful facility.


After carefully installing a hard disk of my own supply into the case, taking great care not to snap the thinnest circuit board I've ever seen (cereal box cardboard is thicker) I was good to go..

You may be wondering why the review sites dont ever include details about the user interface.. That would be because it sucks.

The biggest problem is that the navigation of the files is shockingly appallingly awfully useless. I'll discuss the various file navigation modes.

Suppose you do what any normal person would and bang a few files and folders onto the drive. Suppose you put all the Cafe Del Mar albums on:
Cafe Del Mar 1
Cafe Del Mar 2
Cafe Del Mar 3
...
Cafe Del Mar 10


Now suppose we go to the MUSIC view mode, because that's logical. It simply scans the device for all mp3 files and presents them in one long scrolling list. Our Cafe Del Mar albums have turned into one long list of:
01 - artist - track.mp3
02 - artist - track.mp3
...
10 - artist - track.mp3 <-- end of Cafe Del Mar 1
01 - artist - track.mp3 <-- start of Cafe Del Mar 2

It seems to go album by album, listing all the files in order, so at least all the files in one album will be found in a particular place in the list, but there's no indication of what album it came from. The list seems to allow up to 32 characters wide, so to make it useful, rename your mp3s so that are like:
album - track - artist - title.mp3
And somehow fit it into 32 characters.

My device has 10,000 mp3 on. One long list of 10,000 mp3 and no search function is useless.

Summary? Music browse mode is rubbish

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So let's try the more promising File Browse Mode instead - in this mode we see a more familiar view a bit like Windows Explorer, folders and files, go into a folder and you see more files. Great!
Except, the number of characters you can see has been chopped to just 12. As a result, our ten Cafe Del Mar albums now look like this in the listing:

Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar

Pick the 4th one down in the list - maybe it's Cafe Del Mar 4? You never get to find out because nowhere on screen shows you the full name of what you selected.
Upon entering the folder, you see all the tracks you so carefully named in
album - track - artist - title.mp3
form to make them work with the mega-list, now just look like:

Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar
Cafe Del Mar

too!

Result? Awful. Pointless. Waste of time. Shocking. I'm trying very hard to be polite!


When you exit the folder you find yourself in the folder above - very logical. You also find yourself at the top of the folder above. If your MUSIC folder has 30 albums in (in folders) were in album 28, youre now back at the top and need to press the ""down"" button 29 times to get to album 29.. Here's a tip: dont put more than 7 folders/files inside a folder. That way the device
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So we know that music browse mode is useless, and file browse mode is slightly less useless, how about video browse mode? Select it and the unit will take 30 seconds out of your life to scan all the video files on the hard disk. You then see a screen where 4 black squares load at approximately 7 second intervals. THis is one page. I'm not sure what these black squares are supposed to be - maybe they are movie previews? I was testing with a bunch of star trek AVIs and they always start with a black screen, so maybe if I'd left the unit for a minute, it would have scan/played 4 videos simultaneously. I'd have lost 1 minute, 58 seconds of my life up to that point, but I *might* have been able to see something that would let me identify the episode. At 121 pages (there are a lot of episodes on the drive, that's a worst case of approximately 240 minutes - 4 hours to you and me - to find the episode you want. No wonder we never see any screenshots of this thing!
This browse mode gets a uselessness rating of 11 out of 10.

-

I would love to say that I've tried to use the Picture browse mode - i'm sure thats where 99% of the development effort went in and it's so slick it would make Windows Vista R&D Team cry and weep with shame.. But i just cant bring myself to do it; I cant even try for fear that it will be another shining example of How Not To Do A User Interface and also of Devices Programmed By People Who Never Then Use The Device In Their Own Home So They Can See What A Shocking Hash They Made Of It. Seriously; this interface would annoy even the most geeky, nerdy programmer - the kind who write the worlds most efficient app to do XYZ, but make the interface using neon pink and green buttons on a cyan background.

I dont know why a company would put all the effort into developing the hardware if it is going to be made accessible through software that can only be described in 4 letter words.



I have a few other gripes:

The unit doesnt pick suitable modes based on the connected video. Plug in your pc monitor and it will likely say ""Cannot disply this signal."" Plug the unit into the TV instead - connect up the AV lead and attach it to the composite. Wonder why no picture. Maybe its the Video Display Mode that is the problem? Do we press the DISPLAY button, MODE button or the VIDEO button? Hmm. Press them all at random. No response - oh it's because the unit is still going through its 30 seconds warm-up routine. Wait a while. Hard disk stopped thrashing? Try now - oh wait; the hard disk is thrashing again. Wait a bit longer, and by some trial and error work out we press VIDEO button a few times. Aha! The unit has 3 video ports to cycle through, VGA, Component RGB,
Why cant it just send a suitable signal down the appropriate port?

The card reader cannot be accessed from the PC. Nowhere in the advertising is this stated, so if youre buying this device thinking you can use it to read your digicam pics off the memory card and onto your laptop (that doesnt have a card slot) think again. You have to power off the device, plug a card in, then upon poweron you get the choice to read files off your card or hard disk. The card reader is even more shockingly slow than the hard disk interface and frequently ignores button presses. I guess the idea is you can use the cards to copy stuff to the device - but the interface only allows copying one file at a time. Its painful, tedious, slow and you will just never, ever use it. Gigaview should have invested the time in making everything else better.

The font is rubbish and has no kerning or tracking. This means that all lowercase letters touch each other. A sequence of lowercase L (lllllllllllll) would just look like a black bar because they are all touching.

In every browse mode, highlighting the file starts it playing/showing. Not good if you have to skip over an MP3 that starts with a swear word, to get to your kid's nursery rhyme ones. Press enter to play the file and it restarts the playback, rather than continuing from the position already reached by preview-play. Auto-play doesnt seem to kick in for a few milliseconds, so if you can hammer the navigation button fast enough, you might manage to skip a few files at a time. There is no way to disable the auto-play behaviour so if it does catch you when youre trying to scroll a list of 100 AVI files, youre going to have to wait a few seconds for the unit to finish loading the AVI and previewing it, before it becomes responsive again. The problem is made worse when working with memory cards because they are slow (noted above - freezing/lockup issue)

The playback doesnt run at the speed it advertises when FF or REW. If you put the unit into forward at 2X, it means 2 seconds of movie time should play for every one second that passes in the real world. I worked out the playback to be somewhere in the region of 17X when seeking at 2X. When seeking at 32X (fastest it would go) an entire episode of star trek (45 minutes) was over in a few seconds - at 32X it should be about a minute and a half.

The mp3 player seems to have no random functions, doesnt show the position within the track by default and has a very naff frequency analyzer for visualization. Again - why bother developing a Spectrum Analyzer that updates twice a second, when you can spend the time making the rest of the interface usable.

The navigation interface seems to take up only half of the available screen real estate - The rest of the screen is just useless border from the background picture. Why not expand the nav interface so we'd have more space for things like.. ooh.. words, so we dont have to suffer 12 character file names? I think I might nominate this interface for a Hall of Shame award.

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Now, I can accept that it's a budget device - £40 isnt a lot, but I really really strongly urge you to spend double and get one with a better interface. The low price is a huge false economy because the interface doesnt let you use the capabilities of the device at all.


I now resolve to just use the box for showing videos.
I will name them in folders like this: star trek g g s1s1e1.avi.
I will not use more than 12 characters in a filename.
I will not put more than 7 entries in a folder.
I will use only File Browse Mode because it is the least useless.

Hi
I am having problems too. VISTA does not recognise the drive..... Any suggestions?

Hi
A very damming report by Matt
Its a pity he didn't name what he considers to be much better ones at twice the price.
Also, it would be useful to know if the more recent versions, e.g. the Titan and Zengo have a better user-interface.

Hi
I have the Aqua media player to view video's which work well.
I have just bought the Titan installed an IDE Maxtor 114gb with music files but cannot get a video display when connected to TV also the circuit board is no thicker than the Aqua

Hi
I have the Aqua media player to view video's which work well.
I have just bought the Titan installed an IDE Maxtor 114gb with music files but cannot get a video display when connected to TV also the circuit board is no thicker than the Aqua