An Honest Review of Memorex MMP8640 4GB Video/MP3 Player

This is the first of 3 reviews of these small Video/MP3 Players. I will review the other 2 in the near future. For this review I will focus mainly on the Memorex 4GB Video/MP3 Player MMP8640 model.

I paid approximately $30 at Fred Meyer for this model. Note: Fred Meyer may have quit carrying this model since I bought it last month. And I need to remind people that Fred Meyer is not paying me in any way to write these reviews since many of the products come from their store. And price information is not a recommendation to go out and buy the product either. It is just here for your information.

Let me start out with some of the positives about this model.

Small size, lightweight.
Buttons light up in your choice of 6 colors.
Doesn't require regular batteries. Just recharge the rechargable battery by plugging into a USB Port on your computer for a couple of hours.
Built in Voice Recorder
Has a FM radio built in that you can record.
Can store video.
Can store hundreds of photos.
Can store hundreds of songs.
Displays album artwork on some songs.
Can insert a mini SD card of up to 2GB for additional memory for the MP3 player.

Possibly the best feature of this model is the 500 preloaded songs of several different genres that come with this model. The songs are from artists who are new according to Memorex but I wasn't familiar with any of the artists.

Now for the negatives and unfortunately there are several negatives.

Voice Recorder Button is located on the other side of the volume buttons so you may accidentally find yourself recording when you are trying to increase/decrease volume.

The package labels the FM radio as "Digital FM Radio." This should not be confused with the much better quality HD Radio which is a similar improvement to existing radio as digital TV was to analog TV.

Sometimes if the album artwork is available it will not show up as soon as the song starts playing. In fact on one song it took about a minute and a half into the song playing for that album's artwork to show up. During the time between the start of the song and the time of the artwork's appearance on the screen, you can not skip to other songs or even power the player down.

Other problems I have had with this model included a photo slideshow feature which skipped over a few pictures, and whenever I tried uploading a video to this player the player messes up really bad when I connect the player to the computer and try to open the mp3 player's files. The computer constantly goes through the process of recognizing the device and then acting like it is no longer connected over and over again. I finally had to go into the settings menu on the player and reformat the player which erased all of the files (including the free 500 pre-loaded songs). It is a good idea to back up these songs as soon as you buy this AND before uploading any type of files to this player. Fortunately I did back up the songs before I erased the memory. Also forgot to mention that one song would not copy. Don't know whether it was copy protected or just some bug with the system.

So video playback is highly not recommended on this model. So it seems like it could still make a good music player. Well with the unit I have (don't know if this is just my unit or with all of them), I hear a loud click noise between songs like 50% of the time which is a little annoying.

So if you just want a cheap MP3 player that has preloaded music and don't care for slow responsive times, and a player which does not have highly reliable memory storage this might be the way to go. But for most people this would be a product I would not recommend. Stay tuned there are better ones out there that I will be reviewing soon.