Hotone 70th Ampero Silver Edition

I perform over 250 bookings a year in care homes and hotels playing 50s, 60s, 70s R 'n R etc. to mainly pensioners. My requirements are fairly straighforward, three basic sounds on three preset footswitches, clean with delay, chorus and overdrive. I have been using an old Boss ME-50, taking the Line Out/Headphone output straight into a powered speaker, currently a Bose S1 Pro, keeping equipment to a minimum with no guitar amp. When I saw this with its three footswitches plus a fourth (the CTRL switch) to modify each patch, I thought "YESSSS!" The build quality is top class and so is the packaging. There is no user manual supplied, but this can be downloaded and printed out. Even so, the manual does not really tell you all you need to know. The user interface with its touch screen and control knobs is intuitive and straightforward. There are lots of amp models and effects, along with cab models, all with lots af adjustable parameters. Download the computer software, connect via USB and you can get it all up on you computer screen for even easier access to all the settings. I set up my three sounds, with an added bonus of being able to add a variation of each one by programming the CTRL button, sounded great at home and went off to do a booking in a hotel. When played along with backing track and vocals, the sounds from this unit was just not good enough in my opinion. To me, they didn't have the "guts" and were quite weak compared to my trusty old ME-50 that only has a basic type of inbuilt amp and cab simulation and to be honest, I have a 30 quid pedal from Joyo, attempting to simulate a Vox AC30 that is far superior sound wise. Fortunately, I took my ME-50 with me and changed over as soon as I could.
Returned!

Decent sound quality for a great price.
The customisable features, such as assigning multiple fx to be turned on/off by the ctrl button and the ability to turn the wah on and off by pressing down the top of the volume pedal are quite nice.
The editing screen and the (non-existent) effects grouping on the computer software create quite a clutter, but it's not so bad once you work them out and save them into your favourite presets.

The unit feels very solid and well made, knobs have really good feel. Seems it will last for years. The display is ok, touch function works without significant delay. From the hardware perspective my only complaint would be the expression pedal. It is small... like really small, but I understand where it's coming from.

The stock presets are ok, some better some worse. The magic happens when you start to play around in the software (btw, the Hotone Editor is really cool, if you are a complete beginner you can find very helpful hints "what does what"). You can make some really tasty tones out of it.
It has it's limits though. Despite it having 9 slots to use, some are limited only to particular element (like noise gate, or cab). Not a big deal for me, but someone might consider is as no-go.

The only thing that annoyed my was the firmware update when I got it. It's not a plug-and-play update, which I was expecting. There are some good materials on the web, or you can try to figure it out yourself. Let's be fair, it's not rocket science, but an auto update from editor software would be very useful.

In the end, you can't really go wrong with this one, highly recommend.