RAmos is a brand relatively known in China for their digital audio players. Price wise, their products stand between the cheap Chinese clones that can be found on eBay and players from the larger manufacturers such as Meizu and Teclast. Quality wise, they also land somewhere in between.

In early February 2007, RAmos introduced a new player to their line of Q players, the Q13. At a glance, one would easily confuse the RAmos Q13 with the second generation iPod Nano as their appearances are almost identical. The Q13 is a Rockchip powered player that has a decent set of features. It plays music in MP3 and WMA, plays video in AVI, RM(VB), DAT, VOB, MPEG (conversion needed), and supports Micro SD cards with up to 2GB in storage.

Although the size, form-factor, and screen/button placements might be very similar to the 2G Nano, but the price is definitely not. Due to the nature of this player, this review will mainly compare the Q13 in regards to its differences to the 2G Nano.

Accessories

RAmos follows Apple’s footsteps and strips the bundled accessories to a minimum. Included in the package is the Q13 unit, a pair of headphones, a manual (in Chinese) and a CD.

The bundled headphones are of respectable quality. They do not belong very well packaged with the Q13. The headphones have a sporty look and are in yellow and white, while the players are black or silver with Apple’s minimalist design scheme.

The mini CD is not very interesting as it only includes the regular drivers, video conversion software and a firmware upgrade tools.

Design

When not being misidentified as the 2G Nano or even the 3G Nano, this unit will definitely be called a Nano clone. The similarities are striking. Size-wise they are stated as identical, but RAmos claims that the Q13 is 0.1mm thinner than the 2G iPod Nano. Even the shape, button placement and colors offered are just like those of the Nano. The major difference is an additional button on the front, located on the top left corner of the navigation wheel.

But then again, why reinvent the wheel, eh? The design is thin, sleek and more scratch proof than most other players.

User Interface

Data Management

This device will act as an USB drive when connected to a computer and will therefore automatically have cross platform compatibility. While some love the ability to drag and drop files or freely pick what software to sync their players with, iTunes fans will likely frown at this. The official specifications state this device as USB 2.0, but when transferring the speeds we’ve got have been substantially slower - more like USB 1.0 speed. This might be due to an improper firmware update that we have done.

Controls

In comparison to the Nano, the center wheel is slightly nudged to the right to make room for a small button in the top left corner of the wheel. The buttons of the wheel are not touch sensitive, and although marked with certain functions (such as + volume, - volume, forward and back), the buttons often also perform other functions depending on situation. For instance, when at the main menu, the volume buttons will act as up/down keys.

On the top of the unit lies what seemingly looks like a hold switch, but sadly isn’t. If it were not for the print reading “ON”, it would be impossible to identify this switch as anything else than a hold switch. Instead, this is the central power switch. Apparently, for the unit to turn on, you first have to slide this switch to the “ON” position. Then, you have to press the little round button located at the mid-left on the player’s front.

Despite the fact that the control scheme is inconsistent, it is nevertheless intuitive. Within a few minutes, one should be able to navigate and utilize all the features of this player with ease.

Graphical User Interface

The GUI consists of a lot of black, some white, some yellow and a little blue. The main menu consists of a black background with a wheel of small, white icons. The selected icon is sized larger and in yellow. The Now Playing screen is black and white with only a strip of blue marking the song position.

Although the Apple Nano GUI does not contain many colors either, they use colors more often and more appropriately than in the RAmos Q13. With a GUI like the Q13’s, it might have been better to go with a monochrome screen as it would have resulted in a cheaper product with less battery usage.

Another annoyance with the GUI is that no matter what you select in the main menu (Music, Video, Photo), you always end up in the root folder, where all folders from the three modes are contained. This presents the user with at least one extra click to reach the desired destination.

Finally, all Latin fonts are in Serif, which looks bad on the small screen.

Screen

The screen is a 1.5 inch diagonal TFT in color (identical to the Nano). There isn’t much to say about the screen, it looks good. Color photographs and videos display well and the viewing angle is great.

On the screen there is a thin layer of removable plastic serving as protection against dust and small scratches.

Sound Quality

For the casual listener, the sound quality of the Q13 is pretty good and can be passed as on par with the 2G Nano. For tweaking, six EQ presets and a four band configurable user EQ is offered. The bundled headphones work very well with this unit and produce good sound. Surprisingly, they sounded even better with this player than the more expensive and otherwise great d-JAYS headphones.

This is not a player geared towards audiophiles, as when really careful, one can notice weak bass and a muddy soundstage.

Video

Albeit the small screen, watching videos on this device is an amazing experience. The bundled video conversion program is in Chinese, and although no Chinese language pack was installed on this computer and all text was displayed as question marks, the software was intuitive enough to use anyway.

A 43 minute long, 23 FPS (frames per second) 350 MB episode of the TV show Prison Break converted to 15 FPS 155 MB with the “medium” quality setting. Conversion took around five minutes, and no compression artifacts can be seen while watching the resulting video in the player.

Battery

Battery ratings are usually listed for ideal situations, such as only listening to 128kbps CBR MP3 files, with the backlight always off and with no skipping songs or other manipulation. RAmos states that the Q13 can playback music for 10 hours, which we found to be pretty accurate. We used mostly VBR MP3s with an average of 192kbps, skipped songs once in a while and left all settings default. Doing so, the battery lasted around 8 hours. RAmos states playback time for videos to be five hours, so expect at least four.

Nowadays, new digital audio players are approaching the 30-hour mark in terms of battery life, so although it works, this eight hour Q13 is nothing to be too proud of.

Miscellaneous

Unmentioned previously is that the Q13 can view photos. It is capable on resizing large photos and displaying them on the little screen. One major annoyance with the photo mode is that when viewing photos, your music disappears.

There is also a voice recorder, a Tetris game, and a text viewer (.txt files only). A feature that might be of interest is that it supports many languages. To be more specific, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Korean, Japanese and Chinese (Trad. and Simpl.) are those languages.

Also, on the bottom of the player, there is a Micro SD slot supporting up to 2GB of additional Transflash memory.

Price

The price is what makes this player really stand out. It is available internationally through the website houseofDAP for only $79 USD for 2GB, which is almost half as expensive as a 2G iPod Nano in the same capacity.

Final Thoughts

This player may not be as user friendly as the iPod Nano, but (and that’s a BIG but), it is definitely one of the top players in this price range. In addition to the low price, this player has decent video playback capabilities, something the Nano lacks. And although you probably won’t be marathon-watching Days of Our Lives on the little screen, catching up on your favorite sitcom once in a while would probably work just fine.

In summary, this is a good all-round player with a slim and sleek design recommended for the casual music fan that does not mind people misidentifying their belongings as an iPod Nano 2G, an iPod Nano 3G or a cheap iPod clone. (Hey, just joking. )

Just in case you’ve skipped everything just to read the last paragraph wondering:

1. Whether or not this is better than the new iPod Nano 2G clones found on eBay Yes, by far.

2. Where to buy one of these babies. You can get a 2GB for $79 USD at houseofDAP.