I bought this as a music player. I don’t need a 2.4 inch video player or e-book reader. I will use it while on walks or runs, I wanted something that would fit in my little shorts pockets, which my phone doesn’t. I also figured that a dedicated music player would be better than a phone, that it would be better designed than software I download to my phone such as Poweramp, but it's not even close.
The 32GB you get with this player is a lot of space and the 128GB SDCard would cover a lot of my songs. I also wanted it to have great sound; I recently bought Bose QuietComfort Earbuds and Sony XM4s, so I wanted to take advantage of that and occasionally just sit and lose myself in great sound.
Positives:
This is very cheap even at the current price, which I did not pay. I got it during the Black Friday sale.
It’s small, so easy to take running.
There’s a built-in speaker. It’s not great but it’s there.
There’s lots of storage. I wouldn’t spend money on extra storage. Finding a song on this is hard enough with the few thousand songs that fit in the basic 32GB.
It looks nice and doesn’t feel cheap at all.
Battery life seems pretty good.
It has Bluetooth. A lot of players don’t.
Negatives:
They say it supports FLAC but they know that’s not the full story. It doesn’t support a lot of FLAC files. I’m not 100% sure about this, but I think if your FLAC files are 16bit, you’ll be fine. At 24bit, probably not, but some seem to work. They asked me to send them a FLAC file that wasn’t working and I did. And then I followed up a couple of times but they froze me out. It has been like that on all their devices, so they know.
Navigating between songs is a pain. Basically, you’ll want to set aside a minute or so to get it started and not do anything more till you stop it.
It is the worst possible device in terms of organizing your songs. I’ve never seen anything so bad. Most music software refers to the data inside the songs, this is just random. At first I figured it was a mistake and it would get fixed. I emailed customer support. Don’t waste your time reaching out to customer support. They don’t care about you. They will go back and forth for a bit until they realize, for example, that FLAC song just doesn't play on their device. Then they ignore your emails. They won't even say it won't work.
The sound is quite good, but not as good as my phone, which is a Pixel 3a, which is nothing that special in terms of sound. That may be because in my Sony speakers I can use its LDAC codec on my phone, compared to what it looks like is the SBC codec on the AGPTEK player, which is not the best or the second or third best. I asked their support people what the codec it uses (twice), but they never got back to me. (Again, don’t expect customer support.) Overall though, the sound is good but not mind blowing.
Functionally, if you are fine with playing music from your phone, this is not an improvement. On your phone, you can quickly go from one song to another, even one album to another. On this player, it’s like click- click- click- click- click- click- click- click- click- click- click. There’s a lot of clicking to get from one song to another or even to turn on bluetooth. Design-wise, it would be great if they had an option on the front screen dedicated to the last song, so when you go in you can get right to the music. Instead they filled the front screen with things like voice recorder, video, and e-book. One button says Music, but I found it best to ignore that because whatever it’s doing made little sense to me. It’s better to use the Folder button. I have used a lot of music players on my phone and all of them are far better than this interface. Even just turning the music off is not as simple turning off your Bluetooth device. The player will just switch to the internal speaker and keep playing. Stopping the music should be easier than click- click- click- click- click.
That said, transferring the songs onto the device is pretty easy and fast.
Again and again I kept finding myself asking, do any AGPTEK people actually use this device? Because if I worked there and used this every day, I’d be changing a lot of things. The song layout is not in album order. Also, they use file name instead of song title, which is deranged. Sometimes file names, even though they include the song title, can be so long that I can’t even tell what the song is because they cut that part off. I contacted them about maybe having the option to play songs in track number order. Lots of people like to listen to albums in their natural order. Instead of taking this suggestion and thinking what a great suggestion, they told me to rename all my songs. If this was the first time they’d heard this suggestion, yeah, I might ignore me too. But I read reviews of previous products. They just don’t intend to fix this even though it's a pretty easy fix. When I open an album on my phone, whichever software I use shows me songs in order of track number with the song title, not the file name. I’ve never seen a music player do this random song order.
Bluetooth can get very finicky in terms of turning it on or off or switching to different headsets. Bluetooth can get tricky at the best of times, but I found it especially so with this device. If you are going to set it up for one headset only, you’ll probably be all right.
Overall, I think this is a decent music player for the price, but if you have enough room for music on your phone, I’d stick with that because the sound here is not exceptional and navigating is way easier on your phone. I will use this for running because I like the size. I will set up playlists and I won’t worry about the track order or the fact that I can’t play all my FLAC files. AGPTEK seems to me like a typical company in China that saw a chance to make money. I don’t get the feeling they even like music, so I doubt they desire to make a great product or make updates on this one unless people stop buying it.
| Brand | AGPTEK |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | AGPTEK |
| Part Number | A19 |
| Memory Storage Capacity | 32 GB |
| Digital Storage Capacity | 32 GB |
| Standing screen display size | 2.4 Inches |
| Voltage | 3.7 Volts |
| Battery Average Life | 14.0, 6.5, 50.0, 48.0, 10.0 Hours |
| Batteries Included | Yes |
| Batteries Required | Yes |
| Battery cell composition | Lithium |
| Wireless Type | Bluetooth |
| Connector Type | Bluetooth |
| Supported Standards | MP3, AAC, ACELP, APE, FLAC, WMA, WAV |
| Product Dimensions | 10.6 x 4.8 x 0.9 cm; 97 Grams |
| Item Weight | 97 g |
| Manufacturer | AGPTEK |
| ASIN | B08CXCQR9K |
| Manufacturer reference | A19 |
| Batteries | 1 Lithium Polymer batteries required. (included) |
| Date First Available | 6 August 2020 |
