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Physical Controls (3.80)
Overall, the physical controls on the E100 are decent: good haptic feedback, travel, and are easy to find by just feeling around. The d-pad is below average, however. Since the entire d-pad is a single piece of plastic, if you're not hitting the key on its outside edge, chances are the pad will wobble and you'll end up pressing two directions simultaneously. Also, while the buttons have a nice haptic "click," it doesn't coincide with the button registering a press: you'll need to press slightly harder. This issue might not come up a lot, but it is annoying to have to press the button harder than it's telling you to. It'll result in many presses that don't actually do anything. The unresponsiveness can train users to smash the key harder than need be, which could result in accelerated wear.
Display
 Screen resolution (5.54)
The E100's screen has a resolution of 320x240, for a grand total of 76,800 pixels. This is about average for a device the size of the E100. Don't expect the best quality picture, but it should be good enough to watch your 2.4 inch-diagonal videos. The iPod Nano and Sony Walkman NWZ-A729BLK also had this resolution.
Screen size (6.00)
The display on the E100 measures 2.4 inches diagonally. This average; typically screens on mid-level devices range between 2 and 2.5 inches. For comparison, the Nano has a 1.96-inch screen, the NWZ-A729BLK also has a 2.4-inch screen, and Creative's Zen X-Fi has a 2.46-inch screen. Larger devices, like the iPod Touch or Archos 7 have a screen size of 3.5 inches and (almost) 7 inches respectively.
Pixels per inch (6.67)
Pixels per inch typically relates to picture quality. If the screen has a low PPI, the colors will look a bit washed out and lines might not look as sharp as they should. The E100's screen manages to cram in 166.67 pixels per inch. This is a good score for a mid-level device. The Nano had a slightly better PPI, but it also had a smaller screen. The Sony had the same PPI and the Zen X-Fi will have slightly worse picture quality. Another interesting thing to note is that sometimes devices with larger screens often have worse picture quality than those with small screens. For example, the iPod Touch and Archos 7 both have much bigger screens and higher resolutions than the E100. Their resolutions are a bit stretched out on their screens, however. This is the typical trade-off on media players, so be sure you pay attention to resolution, screen size, and pixels per inch if you're looking to watch a lot of videos.
Screen brightness (4.36)
The E100 is capable of outputting 253 candelas per square meter. If you read that figure and said, "oh ok, cool, I know exactly how this number correlates to the real world," then you're probably lying, but feel free to skip the remainder of this paragraph anyway. First of all, candelas/m2 is a measure of luminance. Luminance just refers to the amount of light that is emitted from the screen. To put the E100's luminance of 253 cd/m2 into perspective, the iPod Nano got 383, the iPod Touch measured 462, and Creative's Zen X-Fi was capable of a miraculous 536. If you'll notice, the E100 is at the bottom of this list. Chances are the screen will look a bit washed out on a bright day. Also, if you, like most people, sometimes use your media player as a flashlight, you'll be dissatisfied with the E100's performance.
The E100 is capable of three different brightness settings and has no auto-adjust (some devices have a built-in light meter that automatically adjusts screen brightness). The screen backlight can be set to stay on for increments of 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, or 30 minutes. There is no "seriously, just stay on," mode, unfortunately.
These are the backlight's timer options.
Built-in Speakers (7.39)
The E100's built-in speakers are about average. They're capable of outputting about 88.3 decibels, which is a substantial, though not impressive, volume output. Most media players don't even have speakers, let alone stereo speakers, and that is especially true for media players in the same class of the E100. In this regard the E100s are ahead of the game, but that's not saying much. The speakers have poor audio quality and will function in a pinch, but we'd recommned using headphones for most situations.
The speakers are located at the top of the back side.
Cable Connectivity (10.00)
The E100 comes with a USB-to-MiniUSB cable, which it uses for both charging and data transfers. When you connect the device, you'll be prompted to choose to between a dedicated data transfer, a dedicated charging session, or a combination of both. The bottom of the device has an 1/8-inch headphone jack and a LINE-IN jack, which accepts a standard 1/8-inch audio plug.
The E100's connects via a standard MiniUSB cord.
Internal Storage (3.40)
The E100 has a stated capacity of 4GB, but that number doesn't include all the software and whatnot that's also stored on the device. Also, virtually all manufacturers have somehow managed to redefine gigabyte as a unit of measurement. Instead of the standard 1,073,741,824 bytes/GB, manufacturer-gigabytes are conprised of a mere 1,000,000,000 bytes; you can always expect to knock 7% off the stated capacity when you're looking at actual storage.
Sufficely to say, the E100 does not have the advertised 4GB of memory, or at least 4GB of memeory you'll actually be able to use. You'll actually have 3.68GB at your disposal. In terms of overall gigabytes, you're getting cheated out of a relatively small amount: 0.32GB is about 8% of the promised capacity. To help put this in perspective, 0.32GB equates to 327MB and change, or approximately 45 songs.
If you hate evthe contents of your E100, you can
obliterate everything.
External Storage (8.00)
Unlike many media players out there, the E100 does allow for external storage. The top of the device has a slot for Micro SD cards. Further, the device has SDHC support.
Battery Life (3.82)
If you're just planning to use the E100 for music, you'll be getting an above average playback life: expect somewhere around 17 hours, 37 minutes. The problem with the E100 is that its video playback life is significantly worse. We were only able to play a constantly-looping video clip for 3 hours, 36 minutes before the batteries were busted. You could probably squeeze two movies out of this, but don't expect much music afterwards.
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