MECHEN MP3 Player with Bluetooth and WiFi，4" Touch Screen Music Player Android 9.0 MTK 8 Core，MP4 Player with Spotify，Audible，Deezer，Amazon Music，Google Play，Downloadable APP (8 Core)

I've been avoiding android based players like the plague for some reason, up to now. In my head the idea of having a full android stack on hardware with wireless etc was total overkill and over engineering for what should be a simple "just do one job device". So with that in mind I had been using small "clip" based players, which are fiddly at best, tried one non-Android touch screen player, and finally reverted to paying £75 for an 8GB Sony Walkman from Argos. The Sony was a total let down, it's essentially a cheap mp3 player you'd find on here for £25 with improved user interface but absolutely crippled by EU regulation volume limitation that couldn't be turned off, gaps between files, fade in/out between files and it would automatically turn down the volume to about half way after a couple of hours of listening. None of this could be overridden by the user. That was the final straw. I've ebayed that and bought this rando branded Android player. I've been nothing but surprised by this and, despite expecting to kind of hate it, I really like it. Note: I have bought the Android 9 "8 core" version of this player. There are some variations (4 core etc) listed. I am using this device as a pure mp3 player. I have no intention of using it with any apps other than the music player that's built into it. I have not and will not be enabling the wifi at all. Out of the box, it powers up, seems to be about 50% charged to preserve the battery while it's been in storage. There are some apps preinstalled on this thing like audible, amazon music, spotify, deezer and apple music as well as some stock android apps like voice recorder, calendar, calculator, clock, fm radio and the chrome browser. I have no interest in any of these apps or using this device for anything else but playing mp3s stored on a micro SD card. You may be interested in this, but my goal is to have a simple player which lasts as long as possible from a battery charge. I think there's a stock android music app, but the app that is included with the player is called HiByMusic. I'd never heard of this app before despite having been through quite a few android music apps on previous smart phones. I can confirm this player in its factory configuration has passed all my expectations. The player is smaller than a typical mobile phone (but slightly thicker than modern phones). The 4 inch screen is perfect for its use as an mp3 player. The display is big enough to be usable, not at all fiddly, but still keeps the player down at a properly portable size. The player comes with a screen protector fitted, another covering over the screen protector that will remove itself after a while if left on, and softer plastic case to which I have fitted a nylon loop (through the central mic hole in the plastic case) to connect it to a lanyard. The player is light enough to be worn around my neck without being too heavy. The display is good and bright enough but I can see it being harder to use in bright, outdoor light than modern OLED type displays with the laminated touch screens. The player boots from cold in 30 or so seconds and you can then swipe up the screen to unlock. Setting up didn't take long as I haven't connected it to a Google account and have turned off the wifi. I added an SD card and formatted it as removable storage with the player itself. I then filled the current (32GB) card with music which didn't take long over the player's internal USB connection. HiBiMusic detected and organised all the music into its library in a few minutes. The HiBiMusic app is really a great player. I'm glad this has been chosen as the software to be shipped with the product. The app is quick and responsive. Music can be viewed by Artist Album etc and after a few minutes of figuring out the layout of the app, can be set so that the Artist view then shows the Albums associated with the Artist which can then be selected themselves. The player has the concept of a current play queue as well as play lists,so when selecting an album, clicking on the first track adds that album to the queue. clicking on another song, say the first song of another album switches out the queue to be the new album. There's the option at both album and song level to add songs to the queue, either to play after the current song or to the end of the queue which is great for building one off playlists for on the move. Speaking of playlists, you can create them on the player itself with no need for a computer at all (unlike the lower end Sony and other cheap "clip" players). In the artist view, you can go into multiple selection mode and select whole albums one at a time (or select all with a button) and add them to a playlist. The app remembers the order in which they were selected, so for example, I created an "all Genesis" playlist and selected the albums in chronological order until they were all selected, clicked on add to playlist, create new playlist (named it) and then added the items. When I check the playlist all the songs are there, in proper track order and ordered by how I selected the albums. Brilliant. There's no problem with the player doing stupid things like organising tracks alphabetically or by the order they were copied onto the filesystem like in cheaper players. The music player app remembers the last track and the position in the track it was playing when it was shutdown. This is very useful for audiobooks etc. The device, out of the box, is set to auto shutdown after 5 mins of inactivity. I wasn't expecting this so thought there was a problem with the player after I'd paused it to do something else and came back to it to find it was completely unresponsive. It has just powered off and a long press of the power button booted it back up (23 secs to get into android, prolly 30 secs or so in total to get into playing music again). In the android settings menu there is the option to extend this (I've set it to the maximum which is 30 mins) or disable automatic power off completely. Keep in mind, doing this and using the player like a phone (always on but in standby) will probably eat through the battery a bit more quickly - but I haven't tested this yet. If I've not been listening to music on the player for over 30 mins I don't find the 30 second boot to music time to be unacceptable. The volume level of the player is what I'd class as normal. It will drive a day to day pair of earphones past the point I'd normally listen to music unlike the Sony which was under in most cases. It won't go as loud as my iPhone with an third party DAC but this isn't really a problem. One of the main reasons for using a stand-alone MP3 player, other than separation of battery cycle is this thing still has a 3.5mm headphone jack which is a real treat in the current day and age. The battery, running just as an mp3 player, no bluetooth, no wireless gets me about three days of use including two sleeps of grey noise on a loop all night. Maybe three days. If I was only listening to music on and off during the day I'd imagine I'd be looking at maybe a charge every week or so. Charging seems to take a lot longer than a modern smartphone that uses high current "fast charging" taking a good few hours to go from empty to full however given the infrequent need to charge this thing and being able to just top it up in between uses, that's not a problem for me. The sound quality is decent. I haven't tested the supplied ear buds but it sounds good on my existing in ear buds and Sony XM3 noise cancelling phones (wired). I can't really think of many downsides to this player other than it's obviously a bit bigger and heavier than my previous stand alone players but this pays of in usability (it's much faster and easier to use with a proper OS and 4 inch display). I wouldn't want the player to be any bigger. The soft plastic casing has a hole for the earphone connection, obviously, but it adds some thickness to the area close to the hole meaning if you have headphones with narrow jacks then you'll be fine but I cannot use some of my other headphones with this player in the case as the case prevents the headphone jack from going fully into the socket. Other than this (and this is a really minor problem, often found elsewhere esp with phones and their cases) i haven't found any reason to get annoyed with this player at all. It's great. If, like me, you're just using it for mp3 playing then I wouldn't be worried at all about the Android system being a bit old (I think we're on Android 13 now?), in fact it's probably a good thing as it's likely it is more simple, boots faster, has fewer features to go wrong under the hood? I don't know how this stands from a future-proof perspective if you're planning to use this with spotify / amazon / apple music etc. I'm guessing at some point in the future maybe support for Android 9 would be dropped. I'm not sure what long term operating system support on this device is like and whether it will get upgraded to newer versions of Android somehow, but maybe the manufacturer will provide updates? I don't know. All I know is that I don't want this device for online services, I want it to effectively be an ipod i can use with tonnes of storage and not be locked into the Apple software ecosystem like with their products. If you're approaching this player from this angle I don't think you can go wrong. Again, HiByMusic will play DSF,DFF,ISO,WAV,FLAC,AIFF,M4A,AAC,MP3,OGG formats so there's a lot of coverage there. The player will also play video files and you can, of course, sign up with Google Play and download different music players or video player apps. Again, I am happy with the built in software and do not want to introduce more load on the operating system and resources by pulling down more apps. I hope this review is useful to you. I write these reviews as an honest reflection of products I have decided to buy from amazon. As with all my other reviews on here these are honest opinions from an actual user of such products. I am not, as I suspect many others are on this site, paid to write any of this stuff. Hopefully you find it useful. I'll update this review should any of the above opinions change.

Wanted a cheap player specifically for playing stored music from subscription services - I use YouTube Music and playing Greatest Hits Radio. (Our older BT-enabled radio doesn't switch between phones so it seemed like a good idea to have a player dedicated). Also wanted a headphone socket for background music when performing at gigs, the USB-C adapters I've used don't seem reliable. Set-up was typical Android start-up, just a bit slow due to the low power chip. Spent a little time ditching apps I don't use. The only issue I had with the interface, which doesn't have a back or switch app button, is that the default display was too small to complete the sign-on to Greatest Hits music. Switching the settings option to smallest display font gave enough screen size to get the submit button on the screen. It takes a little while to start up to get playing. There were also some pops through the 3.5mm output when starting up the app. Adding a card for memory was easy - I've configured it as phone memory to ensure that streaming services have access to it for storage. YouTube Music happily downloaded. The Android is very cut down - which is a good thing, my only concern is that 9.0 is quite back-level so might become unsupported. While you can use old apps, sometimes the servers eventually won't support them. Sound quality through Bluetooth and 3.5mm is good, doesn't seem to have the annoying level protection that Android usually forces on you. So far, doing what I expected it would do as well as I expected, the 3.5mm output being the big winner over just using my phone. Battery life is fairly short, 10% in 30 minutes - at least you can plug it in while playing. Happy enough. Update: it is a bit flakey - YouTube Music crashes occasionally and it got upset about stored music, throwing away downloads. Greatest Hits Radio dies on occasion. Still adequate.

Absolutely brilliant! Nice long battery life. Comes with apps pre installed but you can uninstall them if you want, and add ones you need. Works with audible and YouTube music offline which is brilliant. Lovely clear screen that came with a pre installed screen protector. Lightweight. Comes with a clear protective case and headphones too. The headphones are a bit tinny but it's not an issue. Can expand storage with a mini SD card. Overall absolutely love it. Wish I'd brought one sooner.

I bought this mp3 player for my youngest after buying my eldest a similar product on Amazon. It's a great product with everything I needed it for however the battery life on this mp3 is absolutely terrible compared to my eldest which ofcourse results in big arguments between the 2! Would not buy again based purely on battery life being rubbish.

This MP3 player is very prone to freezing. I would advise looking for another player, as this is a very poor product.

I spent quite a bit of time researching for a new mp3 player before I decided on the 8 core Mechen MP3 player. I wanted something that was super portable and had some versatility. The android O/S was optional but a useful feature to have. Expandable memory was a must. I have been using my main phone as an mp3 player but these days phone sizes do not make for a very portable light solution. I have tried a cheap small screen android phone in the past as a substitute mp3 player and it was dreadful. The Android o/s was so slow and the sound through the 3.5mm port abysmal After a couple of weeks of owning the Mechen player I am really impressed. I see that a previous review has mentioned the sound quality is c**p. In my unit this is not the case. The sound is really good on both the 3.5mm headphone output and bluetooth. I was nervous that the sound would be as bad as my cheap android phone it is not. Whilst it is not in the same league as my flagship phone it is not far behind and way cheaper. Amazon music was preinstalled and I had no issues streaming or downloading my music onto a 128 gig SD card I installed. I would suggest updating the Amazon app as it is not the latest version. I had no issues with the Audible app which was preinstalled and synced with my library and played audio books with absolutely no issues. I had no issues with bluetooth pairing the first time. The device paired with multiple bluetooth devices including over ear headphones, earbuds, bone conducting headphones and a portable bluetooth speaker. It does come with a peel off very thin easily marked plastic cover and tab to pull this off. This very thin plastic cover is purely there to protect the already pre installed screen protector and it comes with a spare screen protector. Another reviewer did mention it is a bit of a faff to register your google account with Android o/s and I agree with this. I seemed to get stuck in a loop with the questions it asked on google registration. I think the solution was the off/on solution :) I have only installed a couple of apps and I would adhere to the manufacturer's advice and not install too many, only 16 gig on board storage. All my media content is on the SD card. Pros Price Size Spare screen protector Android o/s installed with play store. Sound excellent over 3.5mm and Bluetooth Free protective case Speedy operation considering CPU and RAM size no Bloatware Video and sound in sync over Bluetooth. Battery OK probably about 10 hours of MP3 playtime Minor Cons None to speak of

Great little mp3 player. Very easy to use and great sound with Bluetooth. Interface is dead easy to use and looks good particularly the ability to alter text size. Search works well and making a playlist is a doddle. I have a 64 go card in the so card slot and loads very quickly. Do bear in mind the format on the card has to be FAT 32 and although it’s a usb c port it is only running at usb2 speed. No problems with that though. Haven’t tried any video on it yet but will update when I have. The screen is excellent along with various brightness controls and it had good sound enhancements. This player is vey good, in my opinion.

With a 512gb SD card it's not likely I'll ever need to replace this gen. I was using an old phone for music storage before this (because Spotify can suck one) but it bit the dust. Very functional and fit for purpose. So much so that I bought a replacement when the first one got water damaged. Great value for money, do recommend.