Window G89 Reviewed: RK2728 Little Long In The Tooth

Today I’ll be looking at the Window G89 “Touch Magic” 4.3-inch player housing the Rockchip RK2728 chip. I thought at first that this was some kind of iteration of the Window G85. Albeit, a somewhat less impressive, spec-wise, iteration. When we get down to it, however, the G89 really isn’t just the adopted brother of the G85. It’s got a completely redesigned UI for starters. Let’s take a look.

The Basic Spec Rundown

• Screen: 4.3 inch touch screen w/ resolution of 480×272 pixels.
• RK2728 chipset (as opposed to the RK2806 in the G85).
• Support for 720p video files (up to 1280×720) including MKV, AVI, FLV, RM/RMVB
• Support for MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC, OGG audio formats.
• Support for JPEG, GIF, BMP image formats.
• Supports TXT reading with a built in dictionary function.
• Support for composite / component video out.
• Built-in casual games.
• TF card expansion.
• 4GB / 8GB flavours.

The Packaging

The box is simplistic and nice, with spirals and circles and such making up interesting yet irrelevant patterns. What more, really, can you ask from a box? It’s got a nice colour scheme, tells you what size model you’ve got (in this case, 4GB), tells you the colour of the player (though in Chinese and in this case, white). It lists the model number on a barcode sticker. There isn’t really much more you can ask from a box. It’s simple and small and performs its purpose. It’s what’s within that we’re ultimately concerned about.

The Contents

The contents of the Window G89 box which I’m reviewing today are rather spartan, but all the essentials are provided. There is, of course, the player itself, as well as a USB cable, earphones, a warranty card and a manual. Simple and to the point and, though a wall charger or video out cables could have been provided, that’s not exactly a deal breaker in my opinion.

The Player

The player, all 4.3-inches of it, is nice and small. It actually feels smaller than the Ainol V9000HDA, for whatever that impression is worth. It’s light, portable, handy, and the slim frame looks sharp. The overall design – well, lack thereof – is good. It’s simple, minimal, and looks good in white. The microphone and video out jacks as well as the USB socket are on a curve, which looks really great, especially when you’re plugging them in, but does leave part of the jack / plug visible from the back of the player when plugged in all the way. I can foresee this creating minor confusion for just a moment. Wondering as to whether it might compromise functioning, if you have keys or coins in your pocket as well, but that was not tested, understandably. You can see a photo of it below, as well as photos of the sides and back of the player. Speaking of the back of the player, it looks pretty god, is smooth. It has one speaker to the left, but that lacks quality as to be expected and you wouldn’t rely on that anyways.

As you can see, when the earphone and USB cable are plugged in all the way, because the sockets reside on the curve of the player, some of the jack / plug is exposed. This may or may not be a problem for you. For me, it was a slight… annoyance, but that’s only because I’m such a pedant. It didn’t affect functioning at all during my usage of the player.

Here we see the back of the player, with the QC pass sticker, 4G label as well as the speaker. The rounded edges allow you to see over a bit on each side, giving the player a “soft” quality when being photograhped. The “Touch Magic” slogan / naming is printed centre on the back, in font that reminds me somewhat of iMax.

On the left side of the player we have the earphone jack, tv-out jack, USB socket and hold switch.

On the bottom, we have the reset button, the microphone input as well as, all blurry in this picture, the TF card expansion slot. On another note, these players make for fairly useful card readers.

And at the top of the player we see the lone ranger, the power button perched bravely in solitude. Dramatics aside, it looks good.

For some final notes on the look and feel of the player, one thing that stuck out was that you can’t see any screws – this is obviously a snap-shut case. That pleased me to no end as I rather disliked seeing the screws on the Ainol V9000 HDG. Also, the player, though small and light, still inspires confidence. If you put it in your shirt pocket – you’ll notice it. Trouser pocket – you’ll notice it. You’ll definitely notice if you were holding it at one point and then, for some unfathomable and utterly horrid reason, you suddenly weren’t. So, on that front, this thing isn’t feather-light to a point where you being to wonder if it has any internals at all. At the same time, it isn’t too heavy that you wonder how much dark matter was stuffed in there. If this sort of good weight balance pleases you, like it does me, then I hope you appreciate the weight appraisal.

Viewing Angles

The viewing angles on the Window G89 are nothing to write home about. Left to right usually still look ok, but once you start looking from above, the picture becomes brighter noticeably, and when from below the picture becomes darker noticeably. Following are some photographs demonstrating this.

When viewing the player from the left and right at an angle.

When viewing the player from both above and below at an angle. As you can see, the brightening and darkening is much more obvious at above/below angles than at left/right angles, which is to be expected.

The UI

The UI on this little player is actually very interesting, but I’ll get into that later. First, the basics: this is a Flash-based UI which features 3 “desktops” of sorts. The first desktop has all your standard buttons (eg. photos, music, video etc.) as well as the date and time (a nice touch, I think) and a photo rotator that will simply cycle through your photographs and display them. While this is nice and gimmicky, it is largely superfluous and only really serves one function – to drain your battery life, which is good if you’re trying to punish yourself or something.

This is the “first desktop”.

The second desktop is replete with all sorts of nifty features. First you can see what song you are playing; you can search your files for matching text strings using an on-screen keyboard (also imaged below) (when you search, it scans real time so the results also pop up above your text input as you enter it); you can adjust brightness and volume and two simple games are included in the bottom menu, though for the life of me I couldn’t really figure out how to play them.

The “second desktop”.

The keyboard on-screen interface.

The search results – don’t mind that 1080p – that’s a misnomer, a misspell, and it came default on the player.

The third desktop has a small battery meter, a memo popup which you can assign in the calendar as well as buttons to the various dictionary apps on this PMP.

The “third desktop”.

One of the interesting things you can do is move around the icons on this Flash-based UI, I was in awe, before no sooner than 5 minutes later learning that this was actually becoming quite common on Flash-based UIs in PMPs today. Moving the buttons on the Window G89 really is as simple as holding your finger down on one of them for about a second until it goes translucent, then dragging it to its desired new location. If you look a few pictures above to the main menu, and then glance at this bottom one, you’ll see what I mean.

Look how all the things have moved. Interesting to be able to move the buttons. I rather like this feature.

You might be wondering where the calendar and clock have gone. Well, you can hide them in that little drop down menu at the top.

Hiding certain items is great, but I would also like an ability to remove them from the entire desktop itself, including this to down display.

As you can see, that’s where the little calendar thing went. However, be warned, this is not totally bug-free. When moving the battery meter up there, it showed me 100% battery life when in fact I was closer to 0% battery life, so that could be fatally misleading in the correctly contrived circumstances.

The Window G89 “Touch Magic” uses a resistive touch screen, which is easy to use and it doesn’t really have any outstanding niggles except one: moving between desktops in the UI can sometimes be troublesome. Rather than try to drag it across, which ultimately led to the rubberband effect of it slingshotting back into original position, it’s better to give it a slight nudge and let it figure out your intentions. Doing this, I was better able to browse the desktops with light finger nudges rather than heavy handed sliding and pushing, which suits my sort of operating style better. One way to get around this is to be more forceful, but most people only do that on other people’s players.

The explorer of the player is a fairly standard affair, listing directories and files with appropriate filetype icons. The Flash-based UI makes for some great kinetic scrolling – though it does hitch at times, but rarely – as you flick your finger and scroll down 150 songs. Not bad if you’re sorting alphabetically by song title…

When in various modes, such as listening to a song, watching a video or viewing a photo, when you access the main menu, in the top menu bar (which contains battery life, home button) there is a small 24 hour clock. I feel that this is a really nice and useful touch. It was only recently that I got a watch and many people still don’t wear them. Knowing the time is no impediment to anything (except maybe intentional blissful ignorance) so it, though small and might go missed by some, I’m noting it down as a useful and well thought through feature.

Video

This Window G89 player uses the RK2728 chip which is sort of an amped-up version of the last generation of RK chips. Now that Rockchip has moved into the 28xx series, which requires more memory among other things, this RK2728 is sort of an in-between, in terms of performance, between the last generation of RK chips and the current generation. I threw 720p files including MKV, AVI, VOB, RMVB and it had trouble with the MKV and RMVB files. However, these files had great audio quality, and it is definitely worth noting that the player has less trouble with 720p video files when the audio quality is not as stringent, such as with the 720p AVI file we played which is pictured below – the trailer to James Cameron’s Avatar. Picture quality was sharp and colours were nice – not muted or too dull. Subtitles work fine and can be switched on and off as was tested on MKV files, including if they are embedded.

The video playback interface features a nice large play/pause button which was snappy when fast forwading. There was no lag and it seemed to respond as quick as you could expect when fast forwarding from the middle to the end or rewinding vice versa. The buttons int he UI you can see are not immediately self explanatory, but they relate to TV out, aspect ratio, subtitles and subtitle positioning. However, if you are unfortunate enough to press the TV out button by mistake, while viewing a video, what I experienced here was that the player locked up with a black screen had to be restarted. This is most probably because I didn’t have any tv-out cables hooked up, but with the button in such an easy location it is expected that there be some kind of failsafe or redundancy rather than a hard reboot. The volume scales nicely up and down, though it is somewhat of a shame, in my opinion, that there are no volume controls physically located on the player itself, something I rather missed during loud moments in scenes.

Overall, with video, you can expect performance in between old generation Rockchips and the latest, current generation of Rockchips. This is not only on this particular player, but is standard to all players using the RK2728 chip – it almost gets there with high quality 720p video and audio, but sometimes doesn’t quite make it in extremely kinetic scenes. Watching the watchmen trailer, the fight scenes seemed choppy, especially when there was lots of movement. When the scenes calmed down, this seemed to get better but it might just be that it was less noticeable.

Unlike some other players too, there was no option (that I could find </disclaimer) to isolate only left or right audio channels. It also doesn’t appear that you can choose between more than one audio track or more than one subtitle track, though the latter is more of an supposition derived from the interface.

Audio

Audio quality, as is known with Rockchips, is pretty good and comparable to most mainstream music devices such as the iPod. The interface while browsing songs is fairly standard – you can sort by artist, album, genre, track name and star rating.

The interface during music viewing can be a little disorienting at first, but is quickly accustomed to. The fastforwarding is snappy, like with video viewing which is nice. Above the fastforward slider there is the option to repeat 1 song, randomise songs and repeat all songs. Across from that is the EQ mode – pictured above as “normal”. You can choose between normal, MSEQ, Rock, Pop, Classic, Bass, Jazz, and User EQ. Frankly, listening through all of them, the Normal EQ mode was really the most pleasant of the default presets.

Album art – if you have it – displays on the left unless you have a lyrics file which then displays where the album art would be. Below on the bottom you can see various song details like the KBPS, the length of the track etc. All the standard dangles and dongs.

There is no visualizer like there is on other players, but that’s ok in my books as I find them distracting and superfluous. I tend not to watch my player when I listen to music.

Unlike some other players too, there was no option to isolate only left or right audio channels.

Photo Viewer

The photo viewer is pretty standard. You can set the photo to your desktop background, you can set the length of time elapsed between photos in a slideshow (that seem only to use a fade-in/fade-out effect, rather than blinds or dissolves), you can rotate the images which is sort of cool as well as zoom into them. This is all pretty standard affair and you can tell that photo viewing is not really the primary purpose of this player.

TXT Reader

The e-book reader, more aptly known as TXT file reader, is again a pretty standard affair. However, this unthinking reviewer managed to get trapped in the text viewer for nearly ten minutes before realising that to access the menu you had to hold your finger down for something like 3 seconds. Silly isn’t it, of me. The TXT reader has all the standard options including font size change, background change, page autoflip on a timer and bookmarks. You turn the pages by flipping them – complete with an animation – that I think is a little superfluous, gimmicky an frustratingly slow – you, however, may think different. The effect isn’t hugely smooth but it looks alright.

The Verdict

Well, this Window G89 has impressed upon me in many ways, such as with the minimalist good looks and soft curved edges that I rather like. The moveable UI is just incredible, and the UI itself is pretty, snappish and feels nice, like many of these Flash-based UIs tend to. I like being able to customise my menus to how I see fit, to what is comfortable for my everyday operation. Being able to hide certain elements is great as well, as certain things like the search option are largely superfluous.

Which brings me to my next point in a horrifyingly well-executed bridge, is that the superfluity of many of the features can sometimes annoy rather than inspire. The page flip in the e-book (I know, I know, I wouldn’t the thing to read either), the photo viewer rotator on the main desktop… it all looks good but if I could I’d turn it all off. It’s the features of the player that actually relate to playing things which I want.

Which moves us onto the playback performance of the player. Audio is gravy, and to be expected, and since this is certainly marketed as primarily a video player, that the audio is extremely satisfactory is a boon in and of itself. However, video playback, as to be expected with the somewhat noticeable generational gap between the RK2728 chip and its more modern counterparts means that this player can play 720p files, but may sometimes struggle to do so smoothly. Certain files, adhering to the 720p resolution, do play smoothly, some don’t. This could be because of other mitigating factors, including the quality of audio.

As it stands, this player is one where the ceiling is at the floor, if you see what I mean, in terms of playback performance. Sometimes you might expect a player to do better than advertised – for example, if there ever were a player marketed as 720p HD but containing the SC9800 chip. This player’s ceiling is its floor – it performs just how it was supposed to – sometimes slightly under – but it does do it’s job.

From a practical point of view, running HD isn’t exactly viable for long-battery life anyway, so most people who want to take this thing on a sustained viewing won’t be using the highest resolutions for their video files – it only makes sense.

The player is not going to break the bank and for what it offers, at what is a relatively low price point, it holds value. Not great value, but pretty good value.

And pretty good is something pretty good these days.

Discuss this Window G89 review on the forums!

Categories: PMP Review

Tags: RK2728, Window, Window G89