Mfine Mini Speakers Portable Music Player Micro SD/TF USB Disk Speaker FM Radio (088 Black) -Best Gift Ideas

I have had this odd little unit - Mfine 088 - for a few years now and this unit is an incredible value - cheap, sounds great, works wonderfully. This is my "go to" travel unit because so many hotel rooms have lousy radios or none at all and TV is not a good source of music and I don't want to carry a separate BT speaker unit although I sometimes do for longer trips.MicroSD Card: I use a SanDisk Ultra 64 gb micro SD (not completely full) in it and it works flawlessly. I have tried others and they have all worked. You can d/l music from your computer etc to the micro SD Card and then just plug it in. There are no screens to tell you what is playing but your ears know and for 12 American, it's not even on a wish list. Truly plug and play here.Speaker: The speaker has depth and is rich-sounding - it has a fantastic sound - I was blown away by how good it sounds even at high levels and it does get loud - this of course is source dependent as I noted that some of my content is a lot louder than other songs so I have to turn it down. This is better sounding than several of my BT speakers. Clear, not muddy, with a slightly warm sound.Use with iPhone 8+ Poor Sound Solution: So just for the heck of it I tried a test. I used a standard 3.5mm stereo cable plug at both ends (the same as your headphones/headphones) and plugged that into the Mfine AUX and the other end into into a 3.5 mm Lightning adapter and that went into my iPhone. Et Voila! That is a clunky solution to Apple's inability to engineer sound. I need to use a short 6-12" cable - the 3 ft one was all I had on hand while traveling.FM: Press the pause/play button for 2 seconds and it automatically scans and loads each station that registers and then you can use the FF button to scroll through the stations. FM sound is equally good. I've used this in various urban areas and FM selectivity has been good and the station remains locked in - no FM drift etc.LED Light: This is one of those odd-little additions to this unit that works nicely. It lights up during charging by the way so charging overnight you may not want this next on your bedside table.Battery Life: I have had it on for 8-10 hours with battery life left. It uses a BL-5C flat battery - the kind that were popular in older cell phones - you may well have one lying around the house, if you want to have a back up. If not, these are cheap and freely available. That said, I have not needed to do so as battery life was very good.Inputs:Micro USB - this is the charger input.Headphone - self explanatoryAux - in - I found my iPhone 8 to have incredible poor sound output. I was listening to an audio book and it drove me crazy how inadequate the iPhone sound is. See solution above.USB - I have not used it yet so I decided to test it just for fun for this review.I plugged the Micro SD card into:a) Anker SD card thumb sized adapter with a micro SD input. Using the full SD card, it played perfectly but the micro-SD card did not.b) I-FlashDevice HD (3 way USB with micro-USB inside the USB, USB C, Lightning plug) - works fine.c) "USB Type-C/OTG Card Reader/Writer". USB and USB C at each end with SD and Micro slots on either side of the unit. This is a no name unit and it worked fine.I have given this to a friend who expressed great interest in it. I plan to buy a 3rd unit as a back up. Ultimately, the is the cost of a couple of coffees. If it doesn't work for you, return it or give it away.

Great, no-fuss, no-screen, MP3 player. Speaker is more than adequate for what it is. Just fill up the micro SD card with MP3 files and it plays them in order of when they were copied. Simple enough to remember specific song numbers and select them with the numpad.The only downside is the old mini-USB plug. Would love a USB C upgrade. Runs on an old Nokia battery.I set up one for my 7yo son - just copied songs off YouTube that he likes. No need to set up and maintain a more complicated device, no need to pay a service.Also set up one for my aging mother with alzheimers, filled with a couple hundred songs from my collection. Just turn it on and let it run when she wants to listen to music, she can even carry it around with her on its lanyard.

Initially I wasn't going to write a review of this product -- mainly because I think it has many reviews that represent it accurately -- Overall I'm very satisfied with the quality of this product, it's inexpensive, the sound quality is better than expected and functionality is fine for the price. I bought this radio for our toddler, it was a successful attempt to keep her away from our ipads -- because 'I want to listen to a song' seemed to always turn into 'I want to play a game' ... or 'let me just open Netflix and watch a show' -- We didn't want to restrict her music intake, so this device was the answer -- at least when it comes to playing the mp3s, which is all we use it for(I tried to tune the radio, but honestly I just got frustrated with it and I really didn't care about that anyway)...anyway, it's so simple, a toddler can use it. I put a bunch of music on the SD card, not really taking note of how I did it and went on my way -- A few months later, my wife had been reminding me for awhile to put the kiddos 'Little Mermaid Soundtrack' on it because we had started to resort to ipad rule again -- I finally set out to accomplish this goal, thinking I would make short work of it -- I gathered all of her new music and drug all the files onto the SD card at the same time, put the SD card back in the player and found that all the music was shuffled... what the...? So I tried again, thinking I needed to sequence the files by number, because I noticed that Amazon numbers the tracks and several of tunes had the same numbers at the beginning... then I tried it again... still shuffled. Turns out it doesn't matter what you name the file, the player goes by timestamp, what goes on first, gets played first -- this means you need to deliberately drag the files on to the SD card an album at a time so it's all copied over in order -- the random shuffle thing would be fine for me, but I needed a predictable method for the toddler to find her jams, leaving it up to the universe to decide what plays next was just going to cause problems. Anyway, that information is not easily found in these reviews and I thought it would be helpful so you don't waste an hour like I did....