Mitashi MPS 1002

I’m sure I won’t be singled out if I say that I get annoyed by people playing music on speakers from their phones in public places like restaurants. Somehow portable music player manufacturers are trying to make a trend of playing music in public look cool, by releasing MP3 players with built-in speakers. Samsung did it recently with their K5, but other lesser known brands (like YES) have been doing it for years. The latest to join in is Mitashi, with its MPS 1002 portable MP3 player.

Like most speaker-packing MP3 players, the MPS 1002 is quite thick. It’s still quite compact overall, coming close to the shape of the Transcend T.sonic 610. It’s very light, inspite of being so chunky. It comes in a very familiar white and even proudly displays '1GB' on the rear in a fashion very similar to another popular portable audio player.

It has a 1-inch, two-color OLED display that shows you most of what you need to know. Thankfully, they didn’t include a video playback feature in the device on such a small screen. The device plays back MP3 and WMA files.

The interface is once again the same one found on other Mitashi and Transcend players. The main menu has icons to all the features, i.e. music playback, FM radio, voice recorder etc.

The buttons to interact with the UI are on the top which aren’t too convenient since they’re flush with the casing. You will end up turning the device over every time you need to perform any action.

The stereo speakers are on both sides of the screen. They sound surprisingly good for such a tiny device and are also quite loud. Naturally they don’t have any form of low frequency reproduction (no bass) but the quality and clarity is as good as you’d need it. At full volume too, it didn’t distort. I kept it on the dashboard in my car with the windows rolled up. It sounded nice, though there was no thump that I’m used to. It actually sounded better than the loudspeakers in most phones.