Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Bought this two days ago. Elegant little digital unit, and I do mean little (3 and 3/4" X 2" X 3/8") which is very nice and extremely convenient, but there are some unnecessary difficulties which you'd think the manufacturer would want to fix. Instructions on how to use it are pretty much non-existent and you just have to fiddle with it until you get it to do what you think it is supposed to do. Not a great intro for a first-time user. You get two sets of wires that are slightly different without any explanation of what the difference is all about. You get 4 of one type of pad and 2 of two other types of pads. Again, no clue, other than what you can figure out for yourself after fumbling about with it, what the reasoning is behind the differences and numbers. It appears you can use from 2 to 6 pads at a time--no explanation of when to choose which option. They give you a nice piece of plastic on which you can properly store two of the pads once the pads have been taken out of their original package and used. Nice as far as that goes, but once you've used more than two pads you're on your own to come up with a different storage method for the extras. I like the fact that it uses a lithium battery, but lithium is not magic--it's pretty much meaningless without knowing the expected charge life and the specs of the battery itself. It can't be all that powerful--the unit is just too small to accommodate anything larger than a very small iphone-like battery. And the battery is not replaceable--once it's dead you'll have to buy a new unit as far as I can tell. This looks like it's been launched to market without that final review to make sure it's optimally packaged for the customer. I just hope there aren't durability or quality control issues that may have been overlooked in the rush. We'll see. So far so good. I see now that this is the same version as that sold by Mailuokang for about $10.00 cheaper, for which there are tons of reviews. One little question I haven't seen asked or answered is how to access the 16 modes. You see only six modes on the main LCD screen. When you toggle through by pressing "m," you go to the next mode, and after pressing m six times you are back to the first mode. This appears at first like there are only those six choices. Turns out more than 1 choice is available for some of the modes. For those modes, you will see a little number 1 on the screen if more choices are available. To get to the other choices in that mode, you have to press the center button. So for example, when you see a screen with a number 1, you press the center button, and you will see the same screen with the number 2. If you do this while you are hooked up, you will in fact feel it applying a different mode of operation. Being somewhat compulsive, I tend to buy two versions of the same product when I discover a new one. In this case, upon discovering the tens unit (duh, been in pain for a long time and am only finding out about these wonderful machines now), I bought this unit and a Trumedic PL-009 at the same time to compare them. Based on popularity, the PL-009 seemed like a safer bet, but this Tec.Bean unit seemed much more interesting. Actually, the difference is astounding. The tiny little Tec.Bean unit is far more powerful, far smaller, and of course rechargeable. I ran it for most of the day today, and that didn't put a discernible dent in the charge. The PL-009 is kind of a dinosaur, both in design and size, though it works as described. Maybe some things about dinosaurs are not so bad though, when you think about how the art of communication seems to be going down the same path they did. You have to fiddle and fiddle with the Tec.Bean to figure it out, but the PL-009 comes with great, clear instructions, a nice, explanatory video, etc etc.