Ainol P810 Review: Bigger, Not Badder

This is the Ainol P810, but I prefer to refer to it as The Monolith. The first time you see The Monolith, all 8-inches of it, you can’t help but to exclaim some form of “woah, that’s really big” or “wow, that’s massive” or “that’s so big you could kill somebody with that”… ad nauseum. The sheer scale of the player is so wow-inducing, it might even eclipse the sense of shock that one might get from being mugged at a swimming pool. Seriously. It’s huge. Now, let’s get on with the review.

The Basic Rundown

As mentioned before, The Monolith the Ainol P810 is an 8-inch player (with a screen resolution of 800×480). It is powered by the Sochip SC9800 powerhouse, comes with all the snazzy features like SD card expansion, OTG, HDMI, Component/Composite TV-Out etc. The player is not touchscreen operated but is button operated and that is both less cool and more cool. Less cool because you can’t touch your screen so much; more cool because your massive screen stays cleaner. The player comes in 8GB and 16GB flavours.

Other specs include:

• 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 and PDF files (!)
• FM radio: 87.0MHz ~ 108MHz

Note: I won’t be looking at the packaging in this review – just the player.

The Player

The player itself is simple and well thought out – quite similar to the button operated V8000HDW in terms of look. The shell has a nice drop on the front face into the screen which protects the screen if you place it face down. The buttons are along the top right corner and side of the frame, so left handers might have a bit more trouble acclimatising.

The player is not too heavy – in fact, lighter than expected. This is large due to the plastic shell.  There isn’t really much more to say about the outside looks of this player – it is all perfunctory and expected, functional and unassuming – but now we’re beginning to trot into the land of intangible nouns and I’ll leave that out this review.

One thing that did bother me slightly, though, was that the buttons aren’t particularly well seated – some of them are seated at angles. Just a minor niggle. Oh, another little peeve is the visible screws on the chassis. That’s annoying.

The buttons of the ride side of the player: volume, HDMI, USB, USB OTG, charger.

The slots on the right side of the player: SD card expansion, Component/Composite TV-Out (HDTV), Earphone Jack and Mic.

The top of the player – on/off and back buttons. Down in the distance you can see the menu and menu scrolling buttons.

The player also comes with a stand. The stand is flimsy, wobbly but, against all odds, does manage to stand the player up. This is in line with Ainol’s “photoframe” marketing freewheeling we all saw earlier. The stand can be rotated 90 degrees so your player can stand in landscape / portrait mode. Portrait is significantly more worrying – I handled it like a newborn – as it looks like at any time the stand will snap, flick off into your eye and drop your player with an anxiety-inducing thud onto the table.

This flimsy piece of plastic stands The Monolith up.

The Sheer Size

I believe the following image says it all. First up we have The Monolith – the Ainol P810 – second up is a generic 7-inch MID and third up is the Nationite Sflo2 measuring in at 3.5-inches.

The UI

The UI is the same as on the V9000 series of Ainol players – which is a good thing. 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 flash-based UI which looks good. 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. The file browser takes on the same, charmless-yet-functional look and is perhaps the only downer of the overall excellently styled UI.

Operating the UI via buttons rather than touch was no problem. In fact, touch operation might have been a tad bit easier to get used to than when I reviewed the V9000HDG.

The settings page follows the same layout, and there are a wealth of options there for you to configure your player.

Video Playback

The Ainol P810 is powered by the well-known Sochip SC9800 chip – well known for its deftness in video playback and it certainly has no issues here. The player breezed through everything we threw at it, from 1080p WMV files to 1080p RMVB files and everything else in between.

Though the screen doesn’t have the greatest viewing angles (more on that later), when watching a video straight on, you get pretty good colour and brightness. The large screen makes the video viewing experience all the more “cinematic”, if you can call it that, as it is easy to totally immerse yourself in the video and not be distracted by peripheral happenings. Dark and light colours are satisfactorily dark and light. The blacks are pretty black which is good. The colours are nice and vibrant, though not over-saturated which is nice. Image quality on the screen is definitely good – though the player would have benefited from a higher resolution. 800×480 seems a tad low for an 8-inch screen.

The menu within video playback is full of a wealth of features, including the ability to change audio tracks, subtitle tracks, brightness, aspect ratio, whether to shuffle or repeat, stereo audio or just a single channel, the ability to change the font size of the subtitles as well as the ability to change the font colour of the subtitles.

Please also note that this player does not share an old Ainol bug – it is possible to turn off subtitles if they have been embedded in the file.

There were no issues with the functionality of the video playback. In fact, video performance was outstanding – this is definitely a video player. Not a photoframe.

OTG Functionality

The Ainol P810 had no trouble playing 1080p videos off a self-powered external hard drive. However, when playing a 1080p RMVB video off a USB stick, there were very slight hitches that only happened at very infrequent intervals. Certainly nothing to write home about. All in all, OTG functionality performed well. Much better than on the V8000HDW, for example.

Playing videos off an SD card also posed no issues. However, the player won’t recognise a micro-sd in an expansion adapter but the player will function as a card reader when plugged into the desktop with a micro-sd card in an expansion adapter. Funny thing, that.

Viewing Angles

The Ainol P810 The Monolith is just so large – the screen so massive – that one can’t expect the same kind of viewing angle quality from a smaller screen, such as a 4.3-inch one. With that said, we didn’t expect good viewing angles and, as the pictures below show you, the large screen suffers from all the symptoms of an unwatchable tilted screen.

Viewing angle from the bottom – characteristic darkening of the screen to a massive extent.

Viewing angle from the top – colours get wonky.

Viewing angles from left and right respectively. Not great. Click images to enlarge.

Audio Functionality

Audio functionality remains the same as on the V9000 series – nothing to write home about. The interface is intuitive, allowing you to sort by ID3 tags, and one inside and playing a song, we are presented with a familiar screen.

The audio player comes with standard features, such as the ability to shuffle, repeat or repeat all tracks; EQ modes such as Jazz and Rock (don’t use them); the ability to switch up the visualiser to lyrics if you have the appropriate file; brightness; the ability to rate songs as well as change the colour of the lyrics that appear in the visualiser box if you so choose. Don’t expect sound quality to be groundbreaking, but it is solid, as is well known with Sochip players.

Photo Viewer

The photo viewer is a perfunctory affair, with the ability to browse through photographs, set them on a slide, and have different fade-in-fade-out effects such as checkers or a wipe etc… setting backgrounds etc… One really cool feature, though, was the ability to play music from within the photo-viewer via a little button on the menu. You can then switch through songs from within the photo viewer which is certainly nice.

E-Book Reader

Again, this is a perfunctory affair, except for one really funny ability: to have a woman or man’s voice read out your book in robotic tones. This is only funny when you have an e-book containing dirty words. Or, in my case, trying to trick the robot voice into saying suspiciously-eyebrow-raising-but-not-quite-incriminating words.

On the e-book reader – which supports TXT files, PDF, and ini ones annoyingly enough, the standard array of features exist such as changing the background, rotating to portrait mode, setting the book to auto-scroll after a set amount of time etc. One annoying thing is the inability to have just a plain colour background – you actually have to go and create an image that is all just one colour for that.

Could it be? The Monolith reading Charles Dickens? Well, good literary taste can’t possibly be beyond The Monolith which, as you should all know (and if you don’t then shame on you!), holds all the answers to the universe.

EDIT: There was a mistake here – the player can actually open PDF files to the surprise of both myself and Raz. This adds a whole new level of functionality to the device as the large screen makes it an excellent PDF reader. Though the PDF reading is not particularly snappy, it is still decent and would serve well as a PDF reader.

The Rest

Other features such as the calendar/clock, FM radio etc., voice recording (“woah, that’s a big Dictaphone” …) are all exercises in superfluity in my mind. Not that they aren’t nice – it’s just they aren’t particularly useful.

The Verdict

You’ll notice in the title of this review I say that though yes, this player is bigger, no it certainly is not badder. And I think this holds true. As a male, I might be inclined to not believe in the “size isn’t everything” aphorism, but in this case I really believe it isn’t. I see the 8-inch Ainol P810 player – frequently mistaken for The Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey – as filling quite a niche market. It’s not exactly portable – about the size of a Penguin Classic novel, and I rather suspect I’d laugh if I ever saw someone on the bus with one of these.

My own personal inclinations aside, though, this player is fantastic at doing its job, which is what we’ve come to expect from Ainol. Video playback is marvelous, the interface is easy to operate, nice to look at and generally satisfying to use. The music, photo and e-book functions are all practical, non-bloated and functional. What more can one say?

This is a good player – a beast of a player size-wise. It is definitely primarily a video player, and a great one at that, in no small part thanks to the Sochip SC9800 that serves as the brain and heart of this player.

If there was one thing that brings the player down just a little bit, it’s the fairly low screen resolution. One would have preferred to see 1024×600 on this beast rather than 800×480. But that’s it, really.

Another great feature of the player is the PDF reading capability. The sheer size of the player makes it a great e-book reader, and though the player does have a low resolution, the PDF reading experience is not overly dented.

So, if you’re in the market for a large player, or a large player/e-book reader, you really can’t go wrong with this one. If you’re not in the market for a large player, then The Monolith is not for you.

Get yourself the Ainol P810 here at MP4Nation.

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Categories: Ainol, PMP Review

Tags: Ainol, P810, Sochip SC9800