Zebronics Zebmate 75 - Plays Long but Not Too Strong

Zebronics doesn't really impress when it came to Portable Media Players. While the Cinema 3.0 is not worth mentioning, the Cinema 4.3 did a notch better. Somehow, their digital audio players have a different story to tell. The Zebmate 20 seemed to do quite well. The Zebmate 75 is a DAP that claims to have a 75 hour battery life, but is it pleasant enough to the ears?

Simple and straight design

Design and Features
A brief look at the Zebmate 75 gives you the impression that it’s a straighter version of the Zebmate 20. The player is pretty average to look at in the first place, no innovative designs.

You heard that right, we've been playing for days...

The display is a 1-inch CSTN colour screen with a blue background and white text, which could have done better with a layer of glass over it. Next to the screen is a circular four-way keypad followed by a button in the center to select an option. The vertical layout is for the controls whereas the horizontal layout is for previous/next tracks and forwarding/rewinding a track. On the top there is a switch for hold, a button to select length of the loop to be repeated and then a button to play/pause a track.

The player is pretty light in weight at 26g and with dimensions of 70.5 x 28.5 x 12.6 mm it’s sleek enough to slip into your pocket effortlessly as well. It comes with a capacity of 4 GB and most importantly boasts of a 75 hours battery life. The build quality of the player also is quite decent, the buttons are not flimsy and the Zebmate 75 should survive a few clumsy drops.

The quality of the bundled earphones is okay, although an extra pair of earbuds for the in-ear phones makes it easier to customize them to suit your requirements. Other features of the Zebmate 75 include FM Recording, Voice Recording and an E-book reader, which surprised us because at that screen size, reading a book won't really be a good idea. The player has 6 presets, one custom EQ setting and supports common formats like mp3, wma and wav.

What comes bundled with the player apart from the earphones is a USB cable, charger and a small pouch that fits the player and earphones comfortably.

The design of the Zebmate 75 is good - nothing special, but at the same time it’s not too bad either.

Performance
Let’s start off with the battery life cause that's what really left me wondering whether it can actually play that long. The fact is that the Zebmate 75 runs for a good 72 hours without any problems. Although not perfect, we won’t complain about the battery life. On the other hand, unfortunately, the Zebmate 75's performance isn't satisfactory when it comes to sound quality. Here’s why.

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The bass is not prominent and doesn’t have that thump, so it’s just average. The treble can only be heard well when other frequencies don’t play. The mids somehow play better and are quite audible. The presets don’t bring drastic changes in the sound quality, apart from some minor tweaking with the bass and treble here and there. The custom EQ setting will let you customize it to your ears and does a decent job at that. On the whole, the performance is quite Plain Jane. It doesn’t really overwhelm us with the way it plays music, but then again we didn’t expect much in terms of sound quality.

Verdict

Some rest after playing that long

The Zebmate 75 almost lived for 75 hours. It’s still very important that you don’t get exhausted listening to music for that long. This is only possible if you the sound quality is good, if not excellent, which is where this DAP fails to deliver. But at Rs. 2,800 it’s priced aggressively and is aimed at people searching for an average player with a good battery life.