EM326g Car Stereo

by New Owner
(Cincinnati, OH, USA)

Aside from cycling, had planned on using the MP3 player with my car stereo.

Unfortunately this is a no-go... doesn't work.

The device *only* appears to work with headphones / earbuds.

As far as MP3 players go, this limitation is a first for me. It will not output any audio to electronic devices such as a stereo or computer. Simply ignores the device as if you never plugged anything in at all. Third confirmation, connected to a MiniDisc recorder and the phone switched back-and-forth between jack and external speaker. Admittedly, not being connected to devices with large potentisls for electrical differential will help the EM386g remain more reliable.

The sound curve (audio quality) is of course customized for the built-in speaker. But the original sound curve isn't restored when output is redirected to the headphone jack. Sound is still mostly clear, but midrange is excentuated while lows are stripped and dampened.

Also be aware that the phonebook search function does not support special characters such as "." and ":" plus may truncate names ported over from other devices/phones. Search is strictly 0-9, a-z.

To keep numbers separated I would prefix certain names with descriptions like "SVC:" and "AUTO:" and "FOOD:". Since it allows so few characters in the phone book entries this became a problem. In addition I have over one hundred entries prefixed with "SVC:" but it not supporting the ":" meant had to start with "SVC: A..." and scroll down from there. Due to the filter feature I could start from 'T' and scroll up. Definite hassle with over 100 entries. You get a whopping four additional characters when storing to phone vs SIM. Recommend eliminating the space between names and converting prefixes to a number.

Previously held the Motorola w376g which literally made me wait with every press of the button. If LCDs could burn-in there would've been a shadow of that &#@!@$*&^$ hour glass. Most annoying piece of technology on the planet.

Gladly I can say that isn't the case with the em326g... and is why I avoided the flip-phones altogether. It may require that you wait for a bit when decoding large pictures and when pulling a large list of music files from the 2GB micro-SD card. The speed of the micro SD card has some influence on this wait though.

The phone does not use a Windows-compatible file system on the SD card. So files must be managed via the USB port to PC connection. At first I formatted the SD card directly, to FAT32, then FAT(16), finding that it wouldn't recogize the file system. Curious as to whether it may use a Linux Ext3 or Reiser filesystem. (doubt it uses HPFS) Anyway don't be surprised if you can modify the filesystem directly using a Linux Live Ubuntu or other CD/DVD. (and Mac PC)