Functional And Nothing More

I bought this unit to replace an old Panasonic 128MB unit. All I wanted was a an MP3 player. No jpg support. No video support. No voice recording. Just straight up MP3. That was harder to find than I thought. I settled on this unit because it has the flip-out USB connecter. That's one less cable to get in my way or lose.

The unit itself is light, even with the AAA battery in it. This is good because the only time I use it is at the gym. I use rechargable Ni-Mh batteries and get about 4-5 hours play out of them.

Sound quality is passable. Not much bass to it, even when messing with the built-in equalizer or preset audio filters. But it is clear and strong and doesn't distort until you get near the max volume level. I don't really care about the ID3 tags so I haven't paid attention to the song readout on the screen and don't know if what other commenters have said about broken tags is true. Over the three months that I've had this, I haven't experienced any song corruption.

When  more

not easy to use, miserable RCA service

I bought this as a Christmas gift for my son. We had a very difficult time getting it to work initially, but finally succeeded. After only a month or so, it quit working properly and would only show the 'loading' info when turned on but would never finish or play his music.

When we contacted RCA, they didn't even acknowledge a problem at first. When we tried again, all they would suggest was to 'update' it.

Very unhappy with this product and RCA service.

RCA Pearl - The worst MP3 Player available

The RCA Pearl TH1602-A 2 gb MP3 player has got to be the worst MP3 player available on the planet. After owning mine for 3 weeks it crashed and would not boot up to play music. I could copy all of the music off and back on, but it wouldn't power up to play it. It would just lock up on the boot up screen. So after returning it to Wal-Mart and getting a replacement, it lasted another 3 months before the new one started doing it as well. After updating the firm ware three seperate times, it still locks up every 2 to 3 weeks. I then have to re-update the firmware manually, and reload all of my songs onto it. It takes an average of 45 minutes to do this each time.

Stay away from this MP3 player!!!

RCA use to be a good brand.....

Display is nice, convenence of AAA power is nice, built in USB port is nice, locking up every 5 or 6 power ups not nice. I knew I should have returned it after only owning it for a week and the sucker locks up. I e-mail tech support and their response was to re-format it and upgrade it with the latest firmwear. Did that and it worked great, for another week, same problem, locks up during power up, and have to do the same thing. They claim it is the music I am installing, but each time I download different songs.

After spending countless hours re-formating it and re-downloading songs, I am just totally sick of it and went out and bought a different brand player. All I wanted was a simple MP3 player that I could listen to in my car. But the headaches are totally not worth it, get some other brand. You would think that it would be simple to create a low tech device just to play just music, but I guess RCA has gone down hill in the past few years. And don't get me started on their software  more

Buggy as a picnic

I have purchased two units. Both were so buggy that after about 2 weeks, they stopped functioning entirely. Can't even use the radio.
When it did work, I loved it, but it is so frustrating.
OK tech support via webite and phone line; you'll need it. Judging from the call I made to them today, they are expecting to hear from Pearl buyers....
The product is seriously flawed. It won't shut down, freezes up etc.
Tech support told me it would take a SD card up to 2 GB, to answer the previous reviewer's question....

Innovative power saving, but...

I had high expectation and wanted a player that uses AA battery, but was soon disappointed. Here's what I found:

Innovative power saving: no back light, screen not on all the time like existing models, but bright green led (?) stays on for desired setting time when a button is pressed.

Battery: uses AAA not AA as advertised - this just shows irresponsible care for their own product verging on misleading consumers. The included no name battery lasted 13h. I have not fully tried a good battery (duracel or energizer) but expect extrapolation to about +/- 20h (pls verify). This is about 2-3x longer than existing model.

USB cable: built-in and flips in/out. Not a big deal for me vs a usb cable.

Sound: to me it is basically decent, I happened to listen to mozetich and it barely picked up some fine details at max volume level, but it almost blasted my hearing out when it played a preloaded track (getting out by every avenue)

Ergonomically not so good: this player fits perfectly in a  more