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An MP3 player has long been an item on my ‘to buy’ list and I was quite excited to get a closer look at this offering from Acer. Once unboxed, my fist impression was one of ‘oh it’s a little fatter than I thought’. Indeed, my main buying concern for an mp3 payer is that it has to be very small. Too big, and I might as well stick with my MiniDisc player.

Well the Flash Stick is constructed almost entirely from plastic and although it’s quite narrow when viewed from above, depth wise, it is almost an inch thick. Dimensions aside, the first thing I did was to install the two supplied AAA batteries into the longitudinal compartment, thereby increasing the Flash Stick’s weight from 34g to 58g. To get to the compartment I had to remove the USB plug cap by applying a certain amount of downward pressure while simultaneously pulling the cap. With a snapping sound that didn’t fill me with massive amounts of confidence in the build quality, the cap popped off. Interestingly, the sliding battery cover also decided to disengage, reinforcing my doubts about construction.

With the batteries installed, I plugged it into one of my available USB slots using the pliable mini extension lead. My Windows XP PC happily detected the USB1.1 compatible Flash Stick and proceeded to install it as a removable disk. If you’re a windows 98/98SE user however, you’ll have to install the driver found on the CD, which incidentally also holds a sufficiently detailed PDF-formatted manual.

A quick look around the preinstalled directories revealed a couple of mp3 files. One was a left and right audio test (although this is redundant because the earphones are not labelled so and the signals don’t state which is right and which is left) and the other was a Formula One orientated dance track. Distinctly Germanic in flavour, it comes complete with a vocals calling out the word ‘Schumacher’ in tune with an Ibiza-esque bass line and racing car Doppler effect. Classy.

Anyway, I thought it was time to upload and listen to some of my own tunes. Transferring the files is easy enough, and is simply a case of dragging and dropping or copying and pasting the music files to the 128MB of built in flash memory. Transfer speeds are around the typical 12MB/sec you’d expect over a USB1.1 interface. Furthermore, no software is needed which is a bonus, but getting the tracks to play is another matter altogether.

While I would be the first to suggest that you read the manual before using any new product, it’s sometimes a good test to dive straight in so as to get a feel of how intuitive a device is. So where is the play button I asked myself? Well, there’s no button labelled as such, and first I had to kick the Flash Stick into life by pressing and holding (for a couple of seconds) the rocker dial that’s mounted at the fatter end. This triggers a red LED, and I was greeted with the scrolling word ‘Acer’ on the rather dated, blue-coloured backlit LCD.

The Flash stick then goes on to read the contents of the flash memory and fires up a screen showing the track number and time, together with symbols for playback, stop and pause, the playback mode (mp3, WMA, or DVR – Digital Voice Recording), battery status and repeat options.

Ok, so what about the play button? I pressed the mode button first but this cycled through the formats. I then pressed the button labelled ‘rec’ thinking it had a dual function but this triggered the voice recorder function. Ah, it must be the rocker dial then. I pressed this in and nothing happened. I tried again but still nothing. I then held it in for a few seconds and ended up switching the device off altogether. After some fiddling, I finally figured out that you have to press the rocker dial rather rapidly to start the music playing or for pausing and stopping it. This is perhaps a design feature to prevent unintentional playback if, for example, you carry it in a pocket. However, you have a button lock key on the side for that.