720P 7Inch Screen AM FM Movie Video Radio with Bluetooth Speaker, Rechargeable Digital Shortwave MP3 MP4 Player Radio, Support USB/Micro SD Card, Loud Speaker and Headphone Jack (NO TV)

In my area on a hill, FM is good, AM is poor only one station 1400 can be tuning in. Video and sound are excellent. I used this unit as a portable Karaoke device or just listen to my favorited music.

This radio sits in my bathroom for my music fix during showers. It matches my decor to a tee. The battery life is extensive and with the feature of playing my phone through Bluetooth is an extra feature. That was a surprise. I highly recommend this item.

I waited a month before I wrote the initial review as it takes time to see the quirks, the strengths and weaknesses of this device. I have added several revisions to the review to edit several things and added a couple of items. Hopefully you can make a more informed decision in purchasing it. I had purchased this video radio’s predecessor, the SM-617 earlier. The SM-616 is a big step up in performance and easily worth the extra cost. Simply put, it’s built better. In this rather lengthy review, I’d like to cover several points. Other reviews can cover more technical aspects of this product. I’d like to cover what you actually need to know before buying it. The supplied Users Manual: The biggest peeve I had was with the supplied user manual that came with the unit. It was so basic that just starting out using the device was more difficult than it should have been. Other things that weren’t explained in the all to brief users guide was how you could configure the device for optimal operation. In time, I learned things by trial and error. Once I had figured things out, things made more sense. The Video Radio: To best describe this device, I would categorize it as a multimedia ‘Swiss Army Knife’. It can do several different things. It is a Radio. It is a Bluetooth speaker. It is a small standalone Video and Audio Player. It reads text files. All multi functioned like the Knife and yet not perfect tools, also like the Knife. As wonderful as this device is, it requires you (the owner) to make best use of it. You absolutely have to have an understanding of things that weren’t covered in the user’s guide. Simple things like the file format used in the storage of the TF and USB drives (FAT32). Also how large the storage capacity could be used. In my own journey of understanding the functionality of how the storage system should be used - brought me to these conclusions. The unit has three storage ports being 2 TF Card slots and a USB slot. The boot up order is TF2 first followed by TF1 then USB. It should be noted that TF2 is located on the bottom of the Radio. Out of sight and out of mind. The other two slots TF1 & USB on the right side of the Radio. This suggested to me that the designers considered the TF2 being the main slot used. The other two slots were meant to contain temporary media files. Sure, the unit can accommodate media in all three slots but will take more time to come on line. Interesting to note is as the device boots up the battery icon turns red in color as the card is being read. After boot up the player will play the last media file that it had previously played. A User Caveat: when initially starting up the video or audio sections of the player - DON’T PUSH ANY BUTTONS during start up. Give it time to do its thing. Although a nice feature, it could have been better that the device just say ‘Player Ready…’. When the player starts playing a media file on startup, just press the Back Button until you get back to the main menu where you can make your selection of what you want to do. The manual didn’t explain that either. About the Media Cards: Another way of thinking about having a main slot (TF2) and those secondary slots can be thought of the ease of use for the end user. If you only have just a few songs to play or a few movies to watch, just use the side ports and use the Music or Video Icons to access your choices. To a more sophisticated user that can literally have +20,000 media files of both audio and video in their collection - use the TF2 slot only. Ignore the side media ports and use a large capacity Micro Compact Flash Card. On my SM-616 this is a 1TB card rated at V30 or better. As you can guess, with this many media files being stored - it is impractical to use the Music or Video Icons to dig out something you want to access. For this, use the Browser Icon. If you haven’t already guessed, the Browser is roughly what ‘File Manager’ is to Windows. The only efficient way of accessing this many files is to catalogue your stuff and put them into appropriate directories. You also have to factor in that you don’t want to have virtually hundreds of files in the same directory as navigating thru them using the browser is tedious. The selection process is pressing the Forward or Backward Buttons until you find the File you are looking for. From there, press the Select Button to make your choice. Of course, the all too brief users guide doesn’t cover this. Skills needed from the end user: Other things you need to know is the knowledge of having a home media center (Ripping your DVDs) and how to host them on a hard drive. To make them compatible with the Video and Audio Codecs on this player. You’re basically taking a video file you already have (usually encoded at an higher resolution & audio quality). You need to re-encode the Video and Audio to be compatible with this player. I use the Handbrake program for this task as I can do a batch conversion on several dozen movies as an overnight unattended task. Handbrake will also let you compress the audio differences to bring both spoken dialogue and background music scores to normalized levels. You can then amplify the audio that the movie has so you can hear it better. A BIG PLUS as the player’s speaker is facing away from you. These are the skill sets that you need to make the best usage of this player. As other reviews have stated, this is a great player. The bottom line is that you need some computer skills to unlock its potential. About what this device is and the intended audience: What most people overlook in this player is once you have those Audio and Video files on that TF Card, you have absolutely no need for an external service. You don’t need the internet to be dependent on. As a media player, it is standalone. It has everything you need to play your Audio and Video files. Had I been on the marketing team on this, I would have called this player the ‘SOLO’ as nothing else is needed. The intended audience? They could sell tens of thousands of these players to long haul Truckers, RVers, digital nomads and anyone who doesn’t have the living space required for a traditional media center. The player is great for traveling. Also very useful if you’re in bed and don’t want to disturb your spouse. The greatest strength of this player is that it truly is an ‘off the grid’ solution. The greatest weakness is that it requires the owner to have some technical expertise to set it up and load the media files into it. Realistically for all of abilities that the player has for something under $75 USD is actually quite remarkable. Some people might complain that The Resolution of 720p is too crude. My stock answer being that 720p is good up to use when the viewing screen is 32 inches in size. Other issues being you can’t adjust the video display for optimal color or it not being a standalone TV. Ironically it costs less than the 1TB Micro CF Card that I have installed in it. I would never have guessed that this device even existed had I not stumbled across it on Amazon. I’m a technology guy by nature and I’m really impressed at what it all does. I don’t regret buying this product. This covers the media player portion of my review. The other topics being the Audio Player, Bluetooth and the EBook Reader. Audio Player: A basic MP3 player. Doesn’t support playlists or displaying the Metadata normally seen on a player. The good thing is that you can set the Audio Equalization to one of several presets or customizing one. Once you select one, it will be saved to your Media Card for future use. It is a good overall player but not a fancy one. Bluetooth: I’ve used the Bluetooth Speaker feature sparingly as there are better options for most end users. From what I’ve seen. It works pretty well with my iPhone. The limiting factor being the single speaker in the rear of the player. You may be sending stereo to the player but the audio from the speaker is mono. Nice feature, but limited. The AM/FM/SW Radio: Others have chimed in on their experiences here either stating how well or how poorly the receiver operates. Seldom do they say how well the radio worked under the same circumstances as a comparison radio that they owned. I tested this to my Sony ICF-2002 for all 3 bands. If I would give a simple comparison on these lines for each Band, I would judge it this way. FM: This radio does a good job on FM. It is sensitive but the selective properties compared to an Analog is not as good. Actually, many people wouldn’t even notice the difference. AM: The radio does a fair job on AM. As most have noted, it can only pick up local AM stations during the day time. Operation during the night time is only fair as well. Don’t expect to pickup those nighttime stations that you would listen to. SW: To sound optimistic, giving the score of ‘fair’ is being generous using the rod antenna. To actually hear any station other than WWV you will need an external long wire antenna. I did side by side testing with the Sony during both daytime and nighttime conditions on different shortwave bands. However in all fairness, how many of us actually listen to AM or SW radio anymore? The bottom line on the Radio section is don’t expect great performance on either the AM and Shortwave Bands. Ebook section: Actually all that it really does is display simple text files. Nothing more. Nothing less. The reader is as basic as you can find. It assumes that the maximum width is 80 columns. It doesn’t do word parsing near the 75th column and place the next long word on the next line. It just goes to the 80th column and wraps the word on the next line. You are given the option to reformat the display to something easier on the eyes, but you can’t change font size to make it easier to see. Mind you, I’m not saying that it is bad but it is as basic as a text reader gets. Another tool in the Swiss Army knife that mentioned earlier that basically works but isn’t ideal either. Future refinements we’d like to see: Other reviews have stated that it would be great if the Bluetooth functionality in this player could be used also as a transmitter. That way you could use Bluetooth earbuds instead of wired earplugs that had to be plugged into the 3.5mm audio jack. Please…make that happen. The other being the player being able to play 1080 encoded videos that didn’t need to be re-encoded to 720p. If the manufacturer did this, no doubt the player would easily go mainstream. Also having other more modern disk storage formats other than FAT32 (which most casual users know little about). Personally, it’s been fun for me to learn the ropes to get my player up and running. Your mileage may vary. I hope that my review will help you to understand some things and make that right decision.

A versatile compact Radio. Very good connectivity. Take my favorite AM / FM stations. Sound is clear and for its compact size is pretty excellent. Excellent Bluetooth conectivity as well. Nicely made with a retro look to it. Has a nice handle which comes very handy and makes it easy to carry. Comes with its power cord as well. I highly recommend it. You cannot beat the price / performance offer with this Radio.

I play this all day at work in an office. I would not buy it again. In fact, I was looking for another radio and this came up and told me I purchased it a short time ago. So I decided to review it. Good: The radio reception is good, and the radio sounds good. Radio stations broadcast good quality sound, generally speaking, so that's to be expected. Not great spec: USB drive is limited in capacity. 32GB. If you have a lot of newer USB drives, you'll need to buy an older one or a smaller capacity drive. Bad: The USB drive is a bit flaky, pretty consistently it starts to do a skip-skip-skip kind of sound, which typically doesn't go away until the next song or you skip to the next song. It happens on random songs and the USB drive doesn't do it on the computer or in the car, so it's the radio. Happens a few times a day. Bad: Worst is the extremely sensitive volume knob, it's from whisper quiet to hurt my ears in about 5mm of knob movement. That side knob kind of volume control, I expect each swipe from top to bottom to be a decent volume change (to turn it really loud requiring a few swipes, and each swipe giving a nice range of fine adjustment). However, the volume control is probably 10x as sensitive as it should be - one swipe of the knob will absolutely max out the volume, turning the volume from "sorry what song is this?" to "sorry I gave myself a heart attack" or "the speakers are fuzzing out due to the distortion" level of loudness. Because it's so hard to fine tune the volume, I can't adjust it finely enough to keep it at a professional level in the office. I tried and was spending every few minutes trying to get the volume right, but it's so hard to fine tune the volume I was giving myself heart attacks when it went to super high volumes. I play it in the office room next door and pretend it's a co-worker's radio. Why not return it? I figure it'll be tossed out, or someone will get a used one but be charged for a new one. So I'm trying to figure out where it'll work. In the meantime I'm looking for a better one for work.

Awesome little video player. If you're having trouble with video format remember codec needs to be 264, 265 files wont play. Also you can swap the batteries out to nearly triple battery life, look for button top 18650s, comes with 3 1200mah cells, but they make 3500mah cells(do not buy cells from Amazon vendors though, nearly all are crap/list impossible capacities)

I bought this for My Husband for his birthday and he loved it. He brought it to work with him to listen to music to get through his busy workday. He loves the style of the radio as well.

DlYou would be meter off with ANY laptop instead of this. No where does it tell you the it does not it work well with .mov’s. MUST be MP4’s. Would have been nice if they were honest about that. It will work w/ mov’s for a short time but audio gets off, only plays 75% of the movie then doesn’t recognize the usb drive. The battery goes from full to half them full. There is a reason it is so cheap, that reason is bc it’s not worth it. Buy anything else other than this. I am returning it and will just use any ole laptop to watch movies. Save your money.