Hands On: Wolverine MVP

Sometimes too much ambition can work against you. The Wolverine MVP series of devices is a case in point. It does a whole bunch of things and it generally does them well, if not elegantly -- but whether or not it's successful is entirely dependent on your expectations.

The Wolverine MVP plays digital audio (MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV, CD-Audio) and digital video (MPEG-1, MPEG-4, DivX, Motion-JPEG AVI and QuickTime), displays images (JPEG, TIFF, BMP and a host of RAW formats), sports a 7-in-1 memory card reader, and can pump out NTSC and PAL video. It also has more than enough storage space, coming in 60, 100 and 120 GB capacities.

It's important to realize that this is not meant to be an MP3 player or any kind of PMP. It's got nowhere near the cool of an iPod or PSP, for starters. More significant, look at how Wolverine Data describes it: it's a "portable multimedia storage and player" -- it's for storage first, entertainment second. There's no fancy artist/album/genre/playlist menu for audio or video, no themes for images -- just a directory structure that happens to include three folders named Music, Pictures, Video and Backup (the latter is the automatic destination for files copied from memory cards). Navigating is fairly quick -- in particular, I like the sturdy and responsive joystick much better than the control on my iRiver jukebox. But you never forget you're working with a hard drive, especially since the drive mechanism itself is kind of noisy.

The MVP has nice touches, like dead simple video/audio out and built-in file functions like copy, move and delete. I also like the slim remote control for those occasions when it's connected to a TV. But it's definitely not elegant, inexpensive or light enough for someone who just wants to listen to tunes on the bus.