My Thoughts and Reflections on the Victor Reader Stream 3

I’ve been using this piece of gear for a good while. I’ve been holding off on writing about it, hoping they’d make it more stable, but since that isn’t forthcoming, here are some thoughts and such.

I remember some quirks in the Victor Reader Stream 2nd generation, but the 3 has really outdone the 2 in quirks. First of all, randomly, it will go way back in the book or whatever I last read, so I’ve had to get in the habit of making a bookmark before shutting down The Stream. Sometimes I’ve forgotten and boom, I’m back to where I started before I made the bookmark. This is probably the most annoying quirk.

Another one is that it doesn’t seem to shut down properly when I turn it off and it’s plugged in. When I unplug the headset from it, I hear static. The same when I plug it back in. The only way I’ve found to make it shut down properly is to unplug it, then turn it back on, which usually requires me to hold the button down for a reset. When it powers on, I then shut it off and it completely shuts down, as it should but doesn’t when plugged in.

Yet another quirk is that when powering on, sometimes it doesn’t fully announce itself, so you have to guess at when to start trying to get to the bookmark in the thing you’re listening to. It will sometimes not announce properly when shutting down, but I’ve found this to be more rare than when powering on.

Want another quirk? Sure you do, and I’m here to make you happy, oh faithful reader of my blog. Quite often, when changing from say the text files to the talking books it will freeze and say that the book player app has stopped and is resetting. It then goes to the online bookshelf and then I have to go back to the offline one. That process is strange because I have to press the button twice to get it to actually go to the offline bookshelf. This happens quite frequently, more so when I first got it. Maybe that’s settling down a bit.

The design of the case and the layout of the buttons, both are quite appealing. I do really hope Humanware sends updates to address these quirks. Despite these noisome things, I still enjoy this thing as my companion and keep it close by, so I can read whenever the urge strikes me.