I’m considering pulling the trigger on a DAP from Shanling or Hiby sometime soon. I’m kind of baffled though by the commentary I’m seeing both in other forums as well as product reviews about the state of the UI’s language support on some of these units.
I’ve seen commentary for some models from both Hiby and Shanling that people are receiving units where the UI is entirely in Chinese right out of the box. I believe that both companies also have “International Editions” for some models while other models don’t. I’ve also seen commentary on some units that there can be different firmware updates for these international editions. To top it off, I’ve also seen commentary of people on the U.S. Amazon store receiving units that are both Chinese out-of-the-box as well as English (or maybe pick-a-language) for the exact same model of DAP.
So does anyone have any insight as to what’s actually the case with getting a DAP from Shanling or Hiby that’s either already in English or with English easily selectible when I first turn on the device?
I’d be willing to just figure it out and take my chances if I was talking about a sub $200 device. But at $500 or greater, not so much. For that cost I think it’s pretty reasonable to want to know for certain that my native language is easily accessible and whether or not I have to worry about specific firmware updates based on my device’s language support.
ditto also with me dealing with MusicTeck purchases–straightforward English language selection offered during initial set-up for Hiby and Shanling DAPs in my experience. After set-up, all aspects of UI are in, and remain in, English. Subsequent firmware updates same thing.
Came here to say what others have already posted: Purchase through MusicTeck. I have had nothing but great service from them and no issues like those you mentioned.
It just occurred to me tonight that I never followed up on this.
I did indeed go ahead and purchase a Shanling DAP from MusicTeck. I didn’t actually have any need to correspond with Andrew since I knew exactly which model I wanted (M3 Ultra) and it was in stock.
The unit arrived quite quickly since I ended up being only two states over from the shipping origin. I powered it up and…drum roll…everything was in Mandarin or another Chinese language.
Then after…oh, I don’t know…maybe a second, I realized what I was looking at in the center portion of the screen was a language selection list. Scroll…scroll…scroll…English. Done.
It really makes me wonder how many of those “Everything was in Chinese!” complaints I saw had any merit.
On a side note, the Shanling app is substituting a Chinese character for certain “international” characters. For example the Ó in Ólafur Arnalds or the éu in Céu.
For the time being, I’m going to assume this is an issue just with the Shanling app until I get around to trying some other players. I hope I’m safe in assuming that the Android build Shanling uses should have full unicode support.