Wolverine's ESP 5120: Bulk, Not Beauty

This media player is a hardy workhorse for storing digital photos, but it can't be called a looker

by Cliff Edwards

Editor's Rating:

The Good: At its best when playing back uncompressed digital photos

The Bad: Bulky, with an unsexy design

The Bottom Line: A multimedia player best suited for photographers looking to store images while on the road

Reader Reviews

These days, there's plenty of competition in the portable media player market. Everyone from Archos and Canon (CAJ) to Creative Technology's (CREAF) Creative Labs and RCA have been rolling out devices that try to bridge the gap between the entertainment needs of consumers and the more practical demands of business users, who may want a bright screen to view images and files while on the road.

Wolverine's ESP 5120 does a good job at both—though its utilitarian design and software won't win any awards for style. A dull gray unit with flat-black rubberized accents, the ESP can be purchased with hard-drive capacity ranging from 80 gigabytes to 160 gigabytes. There's a bright, 3.6-inch LCD screen, a 7-in-1 memory card reader and a USB 2.0 cable port for speedy file transfers to other devices.

Wolverine ESP tries to be many things, but seems best suited to storing and displaying digital images. With a resolution of 320 pixels by 240 pixels, the screen is less sharp than seen on rival products such as Archos' 504 Portable Digital Media Player, which boasts a resolution of 640 pixels by 480 pixels. It also lacks the Wi-Fi connection capability now common on competing devices. Despite a bulky feel, it weighs in at a svelte 10.2 ounces, while being rugged enough to be taken almost anywhere.

Download Demon

The no-nonsense software is intuitive and easy to use. After switching on the device by pressing a button on the right side, you're presented with eight on-screen menu choices: pictures, music, video, backup, audio record, video record, radio and game (a Tetris-like game called Matrix). By pressing a tiny five-way joystick down, you can tailor settings such as screen brightness, text color, date, and time, as well as view a breakdown of the types of files saved on the hard drive.

Downloads are pretty much automated: simply insert a memory card in one of the two slots on top and the software will ask if you want to back up photos or the entire card. It's pretty fast, too—about 55 megabytes every 10 seconds. I downloaded pictures from a Canon camera in both the uncompressed RAW format, as well as JPEG format, which deletes some information as it reduces image size.

The images were displayed in two rows of four thumbnails. When you push the joystick down, you get another two rows, though it takes a few seconds for them to appear the first time around. There's a nifty feature when viewing individual photos that shows the image resolution and EXIF (Exchange Image Format) data for the camera settings used to take a particular picture.

Below the joystick, a tab marked "esc" backs up to the previous screen, while "menu" oddly doesn't take you all the way back to the startup screen. Instead, it pulls up options to copy, cut, paste, and delete the highlighted item. Two buttons below the joystick adjust the volume when playing audio. For that, you will need to invest in a separate pair of headphones, as the mediocre speaker only plays in mono and sounds remarkably tinny.

White Noise

For those who might balk at shelling out $350 or more for a glorified photo holder, the ESP also can store and play back quite a few media formats that are free of copyright protection software. These include MP3, WMA, AAC, and WAV digital audio, as well as MPEG-4 high-definition video, Windows Media 9, and XviD. But to record video, as with many competing products, you will need to spring for an optional $70 cradle.

I gave the built-in FM radio kudos for a neat, old-style control panel that showed both digital and old-fashioned knob-style tuning. However, reception indoors was nonexistent without headphones. Even with them, there was a good deal of static and interference.

The Wolverine ESP delivers middle-of-the-road battery life for audio at about 12.5 hours. The company attempts to extend battery longevity by shutting off the hard drive when it's not in use. The removable, slim, lithium-ion battery makes it easy to carry a $30 spare.

Overall, the ESP delivers great performance and features for the price. It would be a useful tool for photographers, real estate agents, or even vacationers looking to store gobs of photos while on trips. Just don't count on it to turn any heads in the process.

Edwards is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau.