Ainol V9000HDG Review: 5-Inches Of Touchscreen

MP4Nation have just received Ainol V9000HDG and V9000HDA stock, and what more logical than to follow up with a review. Raz has already video reviewed the V9000HDA here, and now I give you a writeup review of the Ainol V9000HDG, the 5-inch brother of the 4.3-inch HDA. Well, let’s not dawdle around here considering what’s to come. Moving swiftly onwards.

Let’s start with some basic specifications of this player, the Ainol V9000HDG, shall we?

The Basic Spec Rundown

• 5-inch resistive touchscreen w/ 800×480 screen resolution
• Sochip SC9800 chip
• Capable of decoding up to 1280p (1920×1280)
• Supports video formats: MKV, MP4, MPG, DAT, MOV, TS, TP, M2TS, PMP, 3GP, FLV, WMV, ASF
• Supports audio formats: MP3, WMA, WAV, APE, FLAC, AAC, OGG, AMR, AC3, MP2, RA
• Supports image formats: JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF
• Reads TXT files
• FM radio: 87.0MHz ~ 108MHz
• OTG support
• 8GB/16GB flavours

Ok with that all out of the way, let’s move on to the package.

The Packaging

The packaging of the Ainol V9000HDG is actually pretty nice. Coming in a clear plastic container (that’s bound to withstand the rigors of shipping better then paltry cardboard), the packaging actually feels solid and secure, as if containing something quite valuable. That’s the sort of thing you want – a package that inspires confidence in the product it houses. If it came in a flimsy plastic bag, then you wouldn’t have much faith in the player itself, would you? On the box is printed the model number, the brand as well as – in nice large lettering – “1280p”. Bragging rights? Perhaps. Marketing machine? Definitely. That’s not to say this is in any way false advertising – it is absolutely true – but is slightly unconventional when compared with the more common 1080p.

The Contents

To kick you off with some much needed information first, Ainol have taken to shipping their players with the most barebones essentials. If you want to get extra accessories, you actually have to buy a second accessory kit at extra cost – the same goes for those distributors and retailers.

What comes with the player is the player itself (phew), a USB cable, a kickstand plastic bit that allows you to change that fancy yellow… thing… into a functioning video stand which is a nice touch. Raz, in his video review of the V9000HDA, which also comes with the yellow stand, alluded to this as good reusing of the packaging. I, too, was going to comment on the recycling of the packaging until it struck me that the yellow stand is entirely unnecessary in the first place, and adding a little plastic bit to it to turn it into a stand doesn’t so much qualify as recycling than it does an extra accessory, so let’s call it that. Also with the player comes Ainol branded earphones, a manual (which is in Chinese but fairly self-explanatory), a warranty card, a QC pass tag, two stickers and, of course, bubble wrap that the player is packaged into.

The extra accessories box, as you can see, comes with far more in it, including the OTG cable, a remote, wall charger, video-out, a case and etc. Just a pretty standard fair here.

The Player

The player’s nice – 5-inches feels good, is easy to hold, it’s light and it’s portable. The finishing is just remarkable – this little thing really does look good, something Ainol has shown to be quite adept at: making good looking players. It’s as thin as you might come to expect from a player – certainly not e-book reader thin – but thin enough that it’d sit quite comfortably in the front or pack pockets of a pair of jeans, or in the inside pocket of a jacket. The V9000HDG’s weight is not featherlight, but not headstone-heavy either. It’s got some weight to it, giving you that all-important sense of security that it won’t decide to dive out of your hand and smash open on the concrete when you start flamboyantly waving it about amidst a hospital waiting room or bus queue in an attempt to attract attention to your all-new-snazzy-player.

The player’s got an aluminium back (which looks pretty great) with two speakers – the speakers are nothing to write home about, but then again you wouldn’t expect them to be on a player like this.The back is slightly (around 2mm) stepped with a nice bevel, and this really does give it a great look. I can’t stress enough that this player – if you were only to spend your time gazing at it – would not disappoint.

One one side we have the HDTV ouput for composite and component cables, the microphone jack, the wall-charger input, where the microphone is located in case you want to transform this player into a Dictaphone, and an expansion MicroSD card slot. The two screws you can see are actually a bit of a knock on the design, I believe, as they sort of steal away the total-completion feel of the overall case. However, this is only a small niggle and one can’t afford to get tangled up in trivialities.

On the other side we have the HDMI cable slot, USB slot as well as volume controls. In what must have been a merciful move by the PMP gods, a QC3 sticker covers one of those screws, providing a mightier distraction to the design than do the screws themselves. That’s sort of like trying to make an ugly piece of furniture look better by putting an even uglier piece next to it. The same also applies to people, though I felt making such a comparison might be seen as being cold and insensitive. Of course, I couldn’t move on from this paragraph until I at least put that thought into your head.

And on the top we have the the power button and escape button, for navigating ‘backwards’ through menus. Oh… there’s that screw again.

The Interface

Upon power-on – which is very quick… in fact, around twice the speed of power-off – we are presented with a nice ground hugging menu showing off Ainol’s new flash-based UI which actually looks pretty bloody nice. The touch screen is a resistive one, so scrolling is not always the smoothest of affairs, though for 99% of the time you’re generally gravy as far as that goes. Just try not to work the thing with sweaty fingers.

Immediately noticeable is the aesthetic of the UI. The nice icons, the lower case font, the minimal space footprint of it all is just really nice. One of the things – I believe – that you can’t afford to ignore are the little design elements. Though it has been said that the flash based UI is more style than function, that’s something I can’t really complain about. I mean you have to look at the thing every time you use it, right? So why not give us a nice UI, which is what they’ve done.

The file explorer is fairly nice – it gives you size details and all the relevant information in one glance. Kinetic scrolling works – kind of – sometimes you have to be a bit more… encouraging with your finger flicks, but you’ll the hang of it in 2 minutes flat.

(Those lines you see are just the camera catching the refresh rate of the player monitor. Don’t sweat it – it doesn’t actually look like that in real life.)

In more general UI commentary, fast-forwarding in both audio and video files is very easy – simply dragging across the progress ball/button at the bottom (you’ll see what I mean when you see the upcoming photographs). This actually is something I want to stress – it is very easy to fast forward, but not easy to fast forward accidentally. This is something pretty great if you like to go backwards or forwards in your video or audio philes (kek!) like I do. I watch a lot of sports and love that it is tremendously easy to make my own action-replays. I get drawn into certain parts of music and adore that I can listen to a particular part over and over again with a simple and very easy manipulation of the progress bar. This really is an underrated feature. The Ainol V8000HDW, for example, is a proverbial pain in the rear to fast-forward.

Another thing that’s nice about the UI is the very simplistic battery and volume display. A bar for the former, a number for the latter. Brightness also represented by a number and in the top right corner sits a “Home” button (a little house) which is pretty convenient for a quick back-to-desktop.

Video

Video playback is strong, as expected with the Sochip SC9800 chip which is a powerful workhorse and really has no problems with HD video playback. Everything thrown at it, from 1080p WMV’s to MKV’s to MP4′s were just eaten up and spat out by the player, with no noticeable signs of video falling behind audio or other annoying niggles which can be a problem for players with less powerful processors.

To also be more directed, the screen itself is pretty fantastic. Colours look vibrant, yet realistic. Viewing angles are fairly remarkable. (To clarify here as there has been some confusion, the horizontal left-right viewing angles on this player are impressive, while above/below will pale in comparison to the 4.3-inch brother player the V9000HDA. However, in some makeshift simulated test for “over-the-shoulder” viewing, the down angle was still satisfactory and what was on screen didn’t show excessive darkening.) This is the sort of player you can watch a movie on with a group of people behind you watching over your shoulder and they’d be having a blast of a time too. Really quite remarkable. Video quality is excellent, but we’ve already been through that. It has magnificent file format support. This thing is obviously meant to primarily be a video player.

Subtitles display fine, though there are no options to change the size or colour of them. There is a small bug with MKV files where, if the file contains embedded subtitles, you actually can’t turn them off. A minor thing but if you’re a pedant then you may want to give that some consideration.

The menu interface during viewing allows you to choose between multiple audio and subtitle tracks, as well as adjust gamma, aspect ratio, file-play sequence, output resolution, and left/right/stereo audio channels. You can view the various menu items in the image below.

The ability to randomise video playback is a nice touch (for example, if you’re watching music videos) and the ability to keep one on repeat is also nice.

Audio

It’s probably best to remember that this is primarily a video player, and so audio quality / features won’t be great. But in the V9000HDG, they are certainly well above acceptable. Basic sound quality is good – refined – though this probably hinges more upon what kind of earphones or headphones you use. The speakers are, as mentioned, not great but let’s face it, when will you really be using them? I mean, you could on the bus but that would just be obnoxious.

You are able to sort through songs with ID3 tag which is always useful.

When actually playing music there doesn’t seem to be any album art display, but that’s ok in my books. The visualiser is a nice touch and can be switched out to lyrics if your audio file contains them. One nice thing is the ability to rate songs on the go by entering the menu, as you can see in the image below. Also in the image below are the pre-loaded equaliser functions which are pretty snazzy but also pretty dependent on the quality of your headphones or earphones. There is no user EQ which is somewhat of a minor shame.

There also seems to be a feature to adjust the colour of the lyrics, though this wasn’t tested. Further, the music will continue to play when you go to e-book reader or photo-viewer mode, which can be both boon and burden depending on what you want.

One small niggle is that when playing music, and exiting back to the desktop, you can’t see which song or how far along in the song you are. That’s always a nice touch, but as previously mentioned, this is a video player first and audio player second, though it is definitely a very serviceable audio player.

The TXT Reader

The text file reader is pretty rudimentary – what we’ve seen in previous Ainol players, basically.

There are some interesting though largely superfluous options for TXT file reading as you can see in the image below. The one useful ability, though, is that of being able to create bookmarks. This is something that, if you ever found yourself actually reading a TXT e-book, would prove undeniably useful. Frustration-saving useful. All kinds of useful. Font size has it’s usefulness too, but it’s limited by dichotomy. Changing font colour doesn’t add much, though you can rotate the text and read “portrait” rather than “landscape” if you so desire.

The Picture Viewer

On default setting, the V9000HDG doesn’t have the fancy fade-in/fade-out/blinds effects happening at random as it was on the V8000HDW. However, it is an option you can select which, in my opinion, makes for a much more varied picture viewing experience. The screen, as previously mentioned, is just fantastic, with beautiful colours and good depth making picture viewing a pleasure (of course, depending on the pictures). In fact, the colour is not muted at all, though I personally feel some darks could be slightly darker and some brights slightly brighter. A contrast thing.

There are also quite a few options you can customise during picture viewing, such as how quickly the slideshow progresses among other things. You can see all of that in the image below.

The Verdict

Well, to cut a long story short, this is a great player. It’s small, it’s powerful, it’s reliable. It has great video playback quality. It has solid audio playback functionality. Picture viewing is a treat and e-book reading TXT files works… which is perhaps a part of the feature set which might be used least often.

The UI interface is nice – it’s flashy and Flash-based, is beautiful to look at and is responsive enough. It is certainly an improvement over some of the UI’s that Ainol used to put in their players.

In fact, it is a fact that I can’t really think of any deal breakers – none exist. Even minor niggles seem non-existent. For example, if you were concerned about subtitles embedded in MKV files, then that would qualify as a niggle. But I’m not. If you were concerned about a spartan accessory kit, that might be a niggle. I’m not.

All in all this player is just gravy. It’s smooth, it looks great, it performs great, it’s got good battery life, it’s small yet solid, it’s got a hilarious brand name when pronounced “incorrectly”. It boasts an incredible feature set, has a smaller cheaper brother with the same feature set.

So, you make up your mind but if I had to leave with one parting line, it’s that you wouldn’t regret this purchase if you were in the market for a 5-inch portable media player. The Ainol V9000HDG fits the bill. Like spandex. It also doesn’t break the bank… so sort of the opposite of the Joker in The Dark Knight. Which is a good thing.

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Categories: Ainol, MP4, PMP Review, Review

Tags: Ainol, V9000HDG