At first glance, the Xcom P401A looks like a trendy digital camera. It has the usual LCD screen at the back, a bunch of buttons on top, a navigational pad beside the screen, and the camera lens in front – typical! But when I turned it on, I realized that aside from being a camera, it can also play videos (ASF) and music (MP3, WMA, WAV), display photos (JPEG), record voice, and record audio and video from external sources. Just a bit wider than a credit card, less than ¾ of an inch thick, and weighing a measly ¼ lbs., it will hardly make a bulge in your pocket.

Suddenly, it is not so typical after all!

The Xcom P401A’s menu is very simple and navigating it is done via a few directional buttons. Pressing the up, down, left, and right buttons moves the cursor accordingly while the play and OK buttons selects the item. The ESC button stops the current playback and/or goes back to the previous menu. With only a few buttons to consider, learning to navigate through the menus is a cinch. Unfortunately, the buttons are quite hard to press and are sometimes unresponsive. If you are used to no-look navigation in your gadgets, expect to be frustrated with the P401A.

The P401A’s main feature is its screen. At 2.5 inches, the 262K color display produces sharp and vibrant images. Photos are clear and do not appear stretched while short video clips play smoothly and are surprisingly enjoyable. With a wide viewing angle, viewing quality is actually better on the P401A than on some of the higher-end portable media players that I have come across.

The P401A also plays music very well. Even with the supplied earphones, audio quality is good enough to satisfy the average listener. For the more discriminating, the sound can be further tweaked via six preset equalizer settings.

Although audio from the P401A’s built-in speaker is clear enough to be heard, the sound quality is just similar to that of a multi-media capable cell phone’s built-in loudspeaker.

While the P401A is a very capable music player, the process of choosing which music file to play is very tedious and involves a lot of adjustments. First, there is no clear way how the files are sorted on the device and there is no way to re-sort them. Second, the P401A only displays the filenames in an 8.3 format. This means that if you organize your music files in this format: “kitchie nadal – same ground”, the P401A will display it as “KITCHI~1.MP3”. The next song from the same artist will be displayed as: “KITCHI~2.MP3” and so on. How will you be able to know which song is which? Third, there is no faster way to scroll through the song list than to press the “up” or “down” button to move the cursor one item at a time. If you have 100 songs in your library, to play song 60 you have to press the “down” button around 60 times. Fortunately, you can go reverse and press the “up” button around 40 times instead. Either way, it is too much of a hassle. Fourth, one way to address this problem should be to create several playlists. Unfortunately, the P401A does not present that option. Last, the P401A does not remember your last setting. Every time you turn it on, the display goes back to the main menu making you go through the whole process of choosing a song from the list again.

I am not a whiner and I admit that some of the above complaints are petty. Fortunately, the P401A provides different playing options wherein songs can be repeated, played in sequence or at random. As I soon discovered, setting the P401A to play music files at random provided some sort of solution to the problems mentioned above.

In my opinion, the feature that differentiates the Xcom P401A Pocket Multimedia Player from the current crop of portable media players is its 1.3mega pixel camera. Although far from an ideal digital camera, the P401A is equipped with 4x digital zoom and has several customization options to improve picture quality. It is also capable of capturing video. Because it does not have a built-in flash, it can only take good pictures in bright settings. At best, the P401A’s camera function is mediocre. Depending on your needs, the inclusion of the camera either makes the P401A a true all-in-one gadget or just unnecessarily more expensive.

The P401A has a 512MB internal memory which can store around 130 music files. Should you require more space, it also has an SD/MMC card slot to accommodate memory cards of up to 1GB capacity.

The P401A also has an FM radio and can record directly from an external source like a TV or DVD player. It can also record voice but the built-in mic is only effective at a distance of up to 2 feet from the source.

All in all, the Xcom P401A Pocket Multimedia Player is an all-in-one gadget which is basically a music/video player first and a digital camera last. Because it performs well enough as a multimedia player, most users should be satisfied enough to look past its few imperfections.

If you are looking for a cheaper alternative to the top of the line models from Archos, Creative, and others, the Xcom P401A is worth considering.