The Joybee has all the features that you could want in a flash-based mp3 player. Besides jamming out to your mp3s, you can check out what's on the radio. You can also record at various bitrates, with a microphone that has impressive range and clarity. The microphone gives any recordings a “hard?sound, and is not suitable at all for real music recording, but can be just the thing to get a copy of a lecture, or even save that concert you liked so much. The radio is decent, but its channel detection is very weak. Once you have the channel locked in, the signal stays steady. You can only listen to the FM band, but the loss of AM radio isn't a significant problem for most people.

Even though the Joybee suffers from a bizarre control layout, weak software, and a lack of accessories, it still has one ace up its sleeve that helps to set it apart. The Joybee has an SD card slot that enables you to listen to music off of SD cards, and use the Joybee as an SD card reader. Both of these features are incredibly useful. If you have multiple SD cards, you can have multiple sets of music that you can change between without being anywhere near a computer. If you have products that write audio to SD cards ( like the Technics SL-DZ 1200 ) you can record, pop them into the Joybee, and let everyone listen to them. Since most computers don't have built in SD card readers, the Joybee will can take fill that role for anyone who may need it. Transferring data to a new computer is a breeze with the Joybee as long as you have the USB cable. Windows XP has no trouble at all detecting the mp3 player, and finding the files that are directly on the unit, or on the SD card.

Sound Quality
The sound quality that the Joybee delivers is aided by the headphones shipped with the unit. While the headphones are hard, somewhat uncomfortable to wear, and difficult to keep in, they provide great quality sound. Even though the isolation is horrible, the headphones project the sound well, with only a slight emphasis on the midrange. Due to the lack of isolation, music does get hard to hear in very noisy places, but in quiet or moderately loud areas, they work fine. On the mp3 player, you have access to a fairly powerful EQ to tweak your music. Even with the gain at the max, the EQ never distorted the music. Overall, the sound quality is admirable in low noise settings, but in noisy areas, the quality suffers greatly.

H/S Compatibility
While the Joybee has a flawed control scheme, it has solid compatibility on all platforms. Installation of the software onto a Windows XP platform did not yield any problems when tested on computers of varying age and speeds. When working as an SD Card reader, transfers were quick, and navigation was easy. Grabbing recorded mp3s off of the Joybee is easily done through Windows Explorer after a little bit of poking around through the directories.

Using Windows Explorer to transfer files isn't such a bad idea with the Joybee, as the bundled software is nothing short of horrible. The software covers basic playlist management, mp3 playing, and transferring songs while taking up a significant amount of system resources. When creating a new playlist, you have to add songs using the tiny default “open?window that you use with any Windows application. When you have an extensive library of mp3s, scrolling through your list like this is not easy. This window also displays the actual name of the mp3 instead of the ID3 tag, which makes the whole process even more difficult. Once you manage to get your list together, there aren't any compression options to help you get more songs in, so you have to manage size carefully. Unfortunately, software is another area where the Joybee falls behind its numerous competitors. While it is stable, it is much too basic, and takes up too many resources.

Conclusion
The answer to whether or not the Joybee is right for you can be based solely on one question: “Do you use SD cards a lot??If you do, then you'll enjoy a full featured mp3 player that lets you supplement its flash memory with your SD cards, and also lets you read SD cards at any computer you sit down at. If you don't, then the Joybee is just another flash-based mp3 player—only with a bad control scheme, and shaky software support. While the overall package isn't terrible, it doesn't quite stack up to other mp3 players in its price range. This pretty much sums up the BenQ Joybee. It's good, but it's not great, that is, unless you use SD cards regularly.