Hiby R3 Pro II
For context, I owned the first R3 for 2 years before the battery started to swell enough for the screen to pop out. Before that I had a Xduoo X3, Sony NW-A25 and still own a Qudelix 5K.
Shipping issues aside, I really expected to get a premium definitive version of my old Hiby when I received the R3 Pro II.
The main selling point was its sound quality to size ratio that I deemed the perfect format for me to carry around. It felt a bit hefty at first but what bothered me the most was how heavy it was. You definitely don’t want to carry this in your pocket if your pants are not well secured.
The suede feels good and the device seem sturdy enough to not use a case. The control keys are useful but mine become unresponsive once the screen dims even with the right parameter.
It baffles me that Hiby is still praised for their god forsaken OS : the unit is crippled with lags, freezes and crashes sometimes requiring me to reboot more than 3 times or straight up give up on listening to something through bluetooth that just emphasises the slowness of it.
Even with a high grade sd card, every input is a chore and opening a simple folder goes from 2 to 20 seconds. The music library still doesn’t update by itself and has to rescan all of your files for more than half an hour depending on file count with no possibility to use the player in the meantime.
Everything is clunky, when scrolling with the initials of the artists or albums you have to wait for the popup to fade away before being able to click anywhere else, the new tactile volume control is unusable because of how small the slider is and you also can’t click on anything as long as it stays up on the screen.
Using EQ, I’ve had mine randomly saturate bass to the point of the song being unrecognisable. For some reason cycling it on and off seemed to solve the problem for around 4-5 songs before it comes back.
Using a Koss Porta Pro Wireless on commutes, which I admit is notorious for having bluetooth issues, I’ve had more commutes without than with any music at all.
Searching for music feels bad, we finally have an Album Artist category but for some reason I have to scroll since initials search is not available through this, on top of that once you do select an artist, you can only view their tracks as they are not grouped by albums which defeats the purpose of searching for Album artists.
Overall I am disappointed with how the R3 Pro II‘s hardware is held down by its software issues.
Most people would argue that sound quality and features don’t matter as long as you can listen to your music and for this reason I’d consider the R3 Pro II a fail as it is not a comfortable player to use daily.
Edit: And don’t get me started on the play/pause button placement