In these economic times, a lot of people are looking for their bang for their buck. Fortunately, Aluratek has just the bang – the Aluratek Cinepal can be found as low as $99, and it is actually a pretty decent device.
It’s not a tablet – there’s no camera, no GPS, no touchscreen, no app store, but it is built well. There’s a matte screen that will prevent ugly fingerprints and smudges, and the white, nonglossy plastic does the same, and actually looks rather attractive.
Hardware
Let’s talk hardware. The Cinepal comes with a standard array of ports – you have a headphone jack, an power plug jack, a micro USB port, an SD card slot, and a jack for HDTV out, which is always nice. The display is a nice, vivid, 8-inch 720p screen. There’s a built-in speaker, but it’s a bit tinny. The Cinepal is also surprisingly heavy, and obviously not small enough to fit in your pocket. The nice thing about this is that it feels solid and well built. There’s a hard-to-remove kickstand on the back that seems a bit flimsy.
According to Aluratek, the battery will give you enough juice to watch 4 hours of video. However, I was able to squeeze much more out of it – about 8 hours of audio and video, and was able to use the device off and on for about 5 hours after that.
A really nice feature about the Cinepal is that it can read media off of flash drives and other hard disks that do not use a power supply. Just plug the drive into a special adapter that comes with the Cinepal, and you can access your media on the drive. You can also use an SD card up to 32GB for content.
However, if you’d rather use the 4 GB of built in flash memory, just plug it into your computer, where it acts like a typical disk drive. Then simply drop your content in, and you’re good to go.
One special note – the headphone plug has a lot of resistance when inserting and removing headphones. Furthermore, while my good pair of monitor headphones worked like a charm, my cheap earbuds sounded more garbly then usual.
Software
Software wise, the Cinepal features what you would normally expect from a PMP: it does video, photos, movies, music and eBooks. There’s also a file manager on the device itself, which is always handy. The Cinepal can handle a variety of file formats when it comes to audio and videos, but when it comes to that eBook functionality, you’re limited to just text. This will not replace your eReader at all.
According to Aluratek’s website, the Cinepal supports the AVI, VOB, DAT, MPG, MPEG, DivX, H.264, MKV, and RM / RMVB file formats. As for music, it supports “various music file formats.” Not sure what that really means, but I threw on some music purchased from iTunes and that worked, so you should probably be good there.
The user interface for the Cinepal is extremely confusing the first time you use it. For instance, on the front of the device there’s the typical “power” button. However, that doesn’t turn the device on – a switch on the side does. Fortunately, the manual does a good job of explaining all the various features, and how to operate the device. For instance, volume can be changed globally by pressing left and right on the Kindle-esque click pad around the play/pause button. There’s no marking on the device itself that pressing left and right on that specific pad does anything, so reading the manual is good.
The Aluratek Cinepal is a great gadget for enthusiasts who are on a budget. While barebones and sort of confusing to use, it has a great screen, great connectivity features, great codec support and best of all, doesn’t feel cheap at all.