Clix 2 Field Test
I took my clix 2 on a couple of long plane journeys recently, and was quite pleased with it. The earphones (Sennheiser CX300s) were quite good at screening out sound—in fact I used them as earplugs without playing any music when the guy across the aisle was audibly singing along with his music player.
But the real question was video. Would video on a two point two inch screen hold my attention? After getting the clix 2 and finding that it was even smaller than I had thought, I was worried about this.
I shouldn’t have been. Even tired and restless, the video (episode one, season two, of Rome) was absorbing almost immediately. The compression used by KawaiiRiver was barely noticeable, and on that small a screen the 320×240 resolution looked great. There were a couple of time when backgrounds appeared more pixelated than I would like, but that occasionally happens even when watching DVDs.
The motion on the screen was fine, even though KawaiiRiver compresses to a lower frame rate than the clix 2′s maximum.
The audio was also good, although this didn’t surprise me.
The clix 2 performs well on the primary task I bought it for(*, acting as an extremely small (and hence convenient) portable DVD player for long trips. Its other functions—it also plays music, records, receives FM radio, and is a 4GB hard drive—are a rather nice bonus for less than two hundred dollars.