ckinnane

I have been playing with my new T39 over the weekend and I thought I'd share my thoughts about it.

Initially there were some elements I liked and some I hated, slowly the number that I hated grew until I upgraded the firmware from v0.88 to 0.97, then everything became clear.

Its interface is light years ahead of the C260 I was used to.
Its fast, its functional and its minimal - the C260 was none of these.
The touchsreen is accurate, its pinpoint behaviour can be adjusted through the settings.
The one button is the power/lock button which has been appropraitely simplified to just tap it for lock/unlock. The little round part on the front panel is just an indicator LED.

The sound is great - it comes with both the same EQ the C260 had, plus an additional programmable EQ, I only use this one myself. It has 5 sliders, each has an adjustable centre frequency in a range suitable for that sliders position, i.e. the bass slider can be set to centre around 80 Hz, 105, 135 or 175 with either wide or narrow Q. so you can control the EQ precisely, which is perfect for portable headphones.
It has a few types of 3D effect aswell, so you can do 3D plus anothe effect in conjunction.
The sound quality is fantastic - I use a lower volume setting now since it has more power overall than the C260.

It can record up to 192 Kbit/s MP3 from radio, mic or line-in ! I think
you use the headphone port for mic and line-in since it has no internal mic, but I haven't tried it yet. It has a record pause function and voice activation, with that quality level, best to use a plug-in mic anyway.

The internal speaker is exactly what you'd expect, its tinny and low volume,
but is fine for hearing words with low ambient sound.

The video, well, initally I had the old firmware and it was worse than the C260, but with new firmware - it can handle 25 fps with 580 Kbits/s and extreme
qulaity MP3 audio (~240Kbit/s) with ease. the only problem I'm having now is a small amount of constant lag in the audio of some files (like no more than a tenth of a second) which is the inverse of the C260 - that would delay video in high rate streams and progessively degrade.
I can make it go out of sync by encoding 30fps with those settings, which I don't do, because it makes sense to deinterlace 30 down to 24.
For those who prefer to just use the AVIConverter, it has version 4, which has a few more options than AVIConverter 3 and you can choose up to 26fps via this interface.
You can probably encode 30fps at a lower bitrate, I haven't tried it though.

The image viewer is fast and functional, and has a zoom function. you can change the displays theme by starting with your own background image, then changing the colors of the menu components to match, you can even enable levels of transparency in the icons and menus.

It will remember where you stopped a movie or mp3 so you continue automatically.
This can create a problem though. It is possible to delete a file that it had remembered the location of, so when you return to the file as if it hasn't been deleted, the machine crashes.
If it crashes on you, you can reset it with a pen into the reset hole.
This used to happen a lot, but the new firmware seems to have fixed most of the bugs.

It keeps the time and has one alarm function.
The applications at this stage are fairly basic, the best is really the Chinese character input method - which only applies to those who write Chinese, I happen to be learning as my wife is Chinese. It will do character recognition, and works best when you write quickly.

I'd have to say even at this early stage of its life, the T39 is a gem. Its
Linux compatible and you don't even need Windows to do a firmware upgrade.

I think I'll be using this one for years to come.

Without a doubt, it the best MP4 device I've ever seen.
I wonder what Teclast will do next year ? I suspect higher capacity T39s will keep us happy.

mutescream

Have you tried playing any FLAC files with it? I am interested in finding out both any lag (since these are huge files) and how much better the sound quality is with these.

Also, does this unit have any of the hiss that was reported with the T29?

Can you post a link to the firmware update? I imagine those getting this unit will probably want that, as you indicated it is a significant improvement.

Err0r

Nice review, I can't wait to get my hands on one.

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ckinnane

I tried FLAC ages ago, but I can barely tell the difference between 192 Kbps MP3 and 224 Kbps MP3. It makes sense to use FLAC if you want an archive somewhere that can be used as a source for any required conversions later ( you really don't want to accidentally chain lossy converters of any type), but in my opinion, its a waste of precious portable space. The S/N ratio of this T39 is supposed to be pretty good (> 100 dB), so in theory you could plug it into a nice headphone amp or HiFi. I would still use MP3 though.

With a high quality headphone Amp and Sennheiser HD650s, I can say that an MP3 encoded at 224 or higher Kbps, will actually reveal flaws in the pre-Amp of the device before the digital flaws appear.
This pre-Amp is pretty good though, I can plug the HD650s straight into this and get the volume I need no problems, sounds great too.

I think it would beat many home DVD units for sound quality, since it has a nice power supply for a source device and has no physical component related jitter.

CD sound is about 410 Kbit/s, so FLAC wouldn't exceed that (for a CD source).

Putting my subjective opinion about it aside, I'm certain the T39 can handle FLAC no problems, it can handle video encoded at 980Kbit/s with PCM audio if you you like big files.

I don't think it likes actual filesizes beyond 1Gb, but you can break it up into less than 1Gb chunks - that could be just the AVI files though.

Hope that helps.

No hiss. None. I think the T29 that had hiss was probably not normal even for a T29.

ckinnane

This firmware is dated 2007-06-08 on the website:

http://rapidshare.com/files/36731208...9_.97.rar.html

mutescream

ckinnane,

Thanks for the response. One of the reasons I wanted FLAC, is that I like some obscure music, and it seems that in some cases... It is all I can d/l in. I have been debating on a few diff models... This seems the most feature rich of the players I have been looking at, in my price point.

One thing I am going to have to look up is whether or not it is usb 1.1 compatible. I have an older comp, and some of the players I have looked at are not backward compatible.

Job

thanks for the review!

Id like to know how the file(mainly music) browsing is.
What put me off in the T29 for example is the fact that file browsing was slow and inconvenient compared to for example the M6 or Ipod

How fast and easy is browsing your music with the touchscreen of the T39?


ps: the indicator LED on the front...what does it indicate?

20deep

the BIG question...does the T39 have a media organizer?!!?

Err0r

All the previous Teclast models have been USB 1.1 compatible, so I don't see why not the T39 would be.

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evanxvx

This review was great, I'm definetely buying the t-39!

Two questions though, does anyone have any idea when the 16gb one will be coming out? and will there be a protective case for the t-39 model?

thanks!