After seeing the Nextar Ribbit and showing it to my son, I literally jumped at the chance to look at this fun little MP3 player with him.
This MP3 player is SMALL. So small, that not long after Luke had it, he had misplaced it. Luckily, it doesn’t cost that much to replace this cute little frog head.
The bulbous eyes serve as part of the control system on this 1 GB MP3 player. You twist the left eye to control the volume and the right eye to skip back and forth between the different tracks. The button on the front of the Ribbit is the play button, and on the side is the button for changing the mode to the FM Radio or record features. These buttons were a little hard to press, even for my son.
The FM Radio worked acceptably well for such a small device, and the record fucntion as well. It’s sufficient for kids, but not a serious recorder since the bit rate was awfully low.
There is even a pink Ribbit for girls.
If green or pink is not your kid’s color, then you can also get a blue or a grey one.
The sound quality was as good as can be expected for a 20 dollar device. It has an integrated EQ that attempts to make it sound better, but I found the best sound was with the EQ off.
When plugged into a USB port, the Ribbit shows up as a storage device, and all you have to do is drag and drop files onto the player. There is no play listing, just drag the music to it, eject it and you’re good to go. This also worked with Linux, and it should work on Macs too – just not with iTunes, of course.
As for codecs, it supports only MP3 or WMA.
The market is starting to get flooded with cheap MP3 players, and it’s nice to see one trying to be unique and clearly targeted at kids. Its price of $20 also makes it an easy impulse buy, and one I wouldn’t be afraid of a child losing.
Here is one last, kind of cool thing that my son noticed first. The little eyes on the frog will blink when you’re playing music. If this annoys you, you can turn it off. Here’s a shot with the eyes lit up.
The last test was the kid test. My son approves of the Ribbit and listened to it for hours after I got it. He definitely tested the battery and ran it out several times; he loves this little MP3 player.
The Ribbit MP3 player is currently $21.13 on Amazon.com.
What I liked: Simple to get music on and off.
What needs improvement: Some form of playlist support would be nice, but with only 1 GB of storage, well there’s not much on it.