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Hi, is it me or is the forum dead ?

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Pick a number. Add 41. (John Cotts)

its spookily quiet isn't it .. and yes it has certainly gotten alot quieter around here

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As of late, yes, pretty dead. This place used to be hopping, when all the new MP4 players were being released. Once Android started happening, it got quiet.

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The topics on this forum used to cover all sorts of weird and wonderful gadgets, but I noticed a shift toward tablets over the past couple of years. Gone is the talk of the JXD gaming systems and dedicated mp3/mp4 players aren't really made much anymore. And now with the cheap tablets available from Google, I guess there are fewer and fewer people looking for the next greatest (read, cheapest) thing from China. MP4nation, or at least the forum, needs to re-invent itself I think.

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Music ---> Meizu M6TS 4GB, Fiio E5, Audio Technica ATH M50, Fiio S9.
Other ---> Window N50DT, HP Touchpad, HTC Desire, Dingoo A320, Gemei A330, OpenPandora.

Yeah, it's pretty quiet now that the MP4 market is dead. Everything is Android tablet now.

The forums are starting to get even quiter now than ever before. I don't think any amount of reinventing the forum would help, there are a ton of China Android forums now and most are populated with people needing help, which was the same reason why people came here when they had problems with MP4 players, but looking back the trouble shooting for a MP4 player is a lot more simple than the trouble shooting for a tablet.

Troubling shooting earphones is a lot easier

since i have the Elf II, and many problems with other tablets, i just decided to get myself a Nexus 7.

I can't get the service i would like, anywhere. I once had it for my V9000HDA (the person checked the screen and tested it, letting it run a movie on it for about a hour or two, no screen problem), but i think the place where i bought it from, is out of business now. Most places just don't care and send you a tablet with defective pixels, thinking the one getting it won't mind them...well when you spend that much money, you DO. And the big problem is when returning it, if you want to be sure they get it (tracking, insurance), you'll have to pay about 50$ for the return, and there's the waiting, up to 30 days.

I consider myself lucky to have an Elf II without dead or stuck pixel. A lot of China brands show so much promises and good features, but they all fail somewhere, most of the time it's in quality control, or the quality of the components, they always cut the budget in the worst places. And with Chinese tablets sticking with the same processors even if they are 10 inches screens...look what happened with the Nexus 10: awesome screen, super resolution, but the CPU and GPU aren't up to the task for such massive resolution! So imagine that resolution, but with less powerful CPUs and GPUs used by Chinese brands now...

But a 7 inches tablet is still too big when listening to music. It would be great to have another Nationite player for musics, small-sized, maybe with an AMOLED capacitive screen. i think AMOLED screens are cheap-priced (not cheaply-made) for small devices like cell phones now. and Capacitive because once you get used to capacitive screens, you just feel how much resistive screen suck afterward.

The one based on the Teclast T50 was very nicely-sized! the T50 8gb i had, i gave it to my then girlfriend, and somehow someone stole it from her...and later she also broke the SmartQ T5-II i sold her...and here i still have my old Samsung Yepp 256mb, still working, just the internal memory is way too small now, and lack of more audio files support.

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=Tablet1: Asus Nexus 7, rooted, w/ Glazed Jelly Bean ROM=
=Tablet2: Ainol NOVO 7 Elf II 16gb w/ Light Elf ROM=
=PMP: Ainol V9000HDA 8gb Black=

China tabs just aren't as entertaining as the MP3/4 players before them; the combination of all-in-one function, standardized hardware and Android pretty much dashed the possibility. Ainol was the harbinger. They saw the profitability in carpet bombing the market with a gazillion players based around the same internals and recycled externals. Onda was in there too, but Ainol perfected the formula.

True, there are parallels pre- and post-tablet so that's not an entirely fair analysis, but let's face it: glossy black rectangles in varying dimensions all using the same few chipsets+peripherals and running the same OS just can't compare with the variety (and often wackiness) we used to see in MP3/4 players. The bigger loss is the nascent flashes of creativity we saw from companies like SmartQ (Linux-based firmware), Meizu (voodoo-magic sound quality), Teclast (T-series), and Oppo (design/function). Meizu and Oppo escaped to focus on mobile phones; the rest are stuck.

The result, as our Forum Overlord mentioned above, is that Android has become the sole focus, so communities that originally formed to root, hack, mod, et al. mobile phones are now the places to go for All Things Google. IMHO.

You know what? That is SO true. I couldn't explain it better myself. What drew me to the MP4 market was all the different types of devices that were different to the typical players here in the US. Each brand was a little bit different than the other, so this forum was very important to get all the information I needed. My first MP4 was a Teclast that was built like a tank. I eventually moved to the Ainol line up.

Android tablets have become so stale with everybody making the same black rectangle. All of the brands gave up on those little touches that separated them from the pack. It's sad because that creativity of old would help the market. I'd love to try out a Meizu tablet w/ great sound quality for example. My first Android tablet was a Nationite MIDnite w/ small hardware buttons on the frame, full USB host and kickstand that I liked. But now, everything pretty much all the Chinese brand tablets look like a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0.

You nailed it chengdude........

Sad to say, but all of you are right on this. I'm a gadget junkie, some say to a fault. I've been buying/testing/throwing away all types of electronics over the years, but when I found this forum, I discovered the used to be wonderful world of China electronics. I was hooked. I loved all the mp4 players I had, and would love to see some again,just for the fun of it.
Raz, you should buy up all of the leftover stock of mp4 players(if there is any left...)and start up a new forum for the "classic" mp4 players of yore....you would get a stampede over to it, that's for sure At least you could try and get another player with the nationite logo on it(I love my n2 to pieces!!), that would be at least a start.

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Ainol NOVO 7 Elf II 7" 1024x600 Capacitive Screen, 16 GB of memory, 1GB of Ram, 32GB microSD card, Dual Core, Android 4.0.3 with the Custom Dark Elf Rom. VIDEO REVIEW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpsSK5G0XMo

UG802 Android On A Stick HDMI based Android TV Device. 1080p Video, 4GB Ram, 32GB microSD card, Android 4.1.1 Jellybean, Rockchip 3066 Dual Core. VIDEO REVIEW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gqd1AjJm60