MP3 Gaze

Those tapes that allow you to play stuff off your MP3 player through your car stereo are one of the most ingenious inventions of all time. MobiBLU have taken it to THE NEXT LEVEL.

It may look the same, but it’s not. This isn’t an adapter. It’s an MP3 player in its own right. Plug it into your car stereo and it works the same, only you won’t have wires tangled round your gearstick because it’s all in this one little thing.

So you can keep your old car stereo, safe in the knowledge that no-one’ll nick it because it’s so old and shit, yet you can still enjoy music digitally.

I’ll say it again: Ingenious.

This picture is supposed to be a joke, but I consider it a recommended course of action.

If there’s even the slightest chance that an MP3 player could be mistaken for some sugar then something’s very wrong. Technology and beverage additives are from different worlds. They should never cross.

Chalk’ll be looking like cheese next. Chalk and cheese are resolutely, famously, not the same.

Just the two of us, we can make it if we try.

MobiBLU’s website boasts of a “laser etched metal keyoad”. Now I don’t know what a ‘keyoad’ is, but I want one and surely so must you.

Just imagine the scenario. Your friend gets out his or her MP3 player and starts going on about its memory size and how unbelievably small it is. Another friend does the same. And another. How do you decide who’s got the best MP3 player. You can’t. They’re all much the same.

At this point, you whip out your MobiBLU US2 and say: ‘Ah, but have any of you got an MP3 player with a laser etched metal keyoad?’

It’s the weakest marketing campaign EVER.

“With such a small size of 91.5 mm X 53.8 mm X 14.8 mm, it’s really easy to carry” - and lose.

“Connected to a computer, it is recognized by Windows Explorer as a removable storage device, enabling you to upload and download files easily” - like a memory card then. Revolutionary.

“You can sort saved files to folders of your choice” - can you name these folders? That would really swing it for me.

“You can even select the music you want to play by searching [the folders] during playback” - so you can ACTUALLY CHOOSE what to listen to?

Other highlights include two choices of colour and how it remembers what you were listening to and how loudly if you switch it off for a bit.

It’s like I’ve died and gone to MP3 player heaven.

MobIBLU say that the DAH-2100 has an ‘oversize color Organic Light Emitting Diode display’.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the screen is DEFINITELY smaller than the player itself, isn’t it? The player itself is only 31mm x 65mm x 14mm. That screen is most definitely NOT oversize. It’s undersize.

I sometimes slag off MP3 players that are nearly 10cm in length for being too small. All MobiBLU’s products seem to be half that size. I could alter my standards accordingly and be more generous to the relatively large MP3 players, but that would be missing the point. An even bigger wrong doesn’t render other wrongs right.

All MP3 players are too small. MobiBLU’s are FAR too small.

Verdict: None out of three.

I don’t normally start with a verdict, but it’s important that you know in this case. MobiBLU’s DAH-1500i Cube MP3 player is less than an inch in every direction. I’ll reproduce the measurements of shame in metric - 24mm x 24mm x 24mm.

I’m not going to repeat myself because I’ve made my feelings about stupidly over-tiny MP3 players before. Specifically in my update about the Cube 2, which is the smallest multimedia player there is. The DAH-1500i is slightly smaller than that, but it only does audio. It doesn’t make it any more forgivable though.

The DAH-1500i has its own blog. It doesn’t seem to have quite grasped what a blog is, however, having only updated the once, several years ago. Maybe its building up to another post for its second anniversary.

“The world’s smallest digital multimedia player”

This is it. This is what’s to blame. This is the smallest and therefore stupidest multimedia player on the market. Or so MobiBLU say and if they’re actually BOASTING about this horrific fact, then they deserve all the ridicule that it’s possible to heap on one stupidly named company.

MobiBLU’s Cube 2 is one inch, by one inch, by one inch. In real measurements that’s 25.4mm x 25.4mm x 25.4mm. I could lose something that size before I’d even left the shop. I’d have to get it delivered, but then the cat would probably eat it before I’d noticed it had dropped through the door.

I hate the Cube 2 and all it stands for. Fortunately, I reckon that I could take the Cube 2 in a fight, being as it’s so minuscule. I could probably take a whole army of Cube 2s and would relish the opportunity to do so.

MobiBLU really seem keen on adding meaningless suffixes to ordinary words when naming their products. Following on from the Cubisto, we now have ‘Boxon’.

The Boxon comes in either 1GB or 2GB size. The battery life is a laughable 12 hours for audio and a beyond laughable four hours for video. It’s less than 5cm in size, which is really, really, staggeringly stupid and pointless. Do you know how big 5cm is? Why bother?

However, in their defence, MobiBLU’s website advertises the Boxon with the following phrase: “Available in TWO colors!” - which is either the first recorded use of irony in the entire technological industry, or the most pathetic attempt to dress up a negative as a positive I’ve ever seen. Either way, it’s a slap in the face for the ’show your individuality with our product’ lobby.

The two colours are black and white, by the way.

This isn’t so difficult to rate.

Verdict: None out of three.

Here’s why. Firstly, ‘Q-Bling’. Words fail me. ‘Bling’ isn’t a good thing, I don’t know what the Q is and more than that, I don’t want to know what the Q is.

And there’s more. ‘Features genuine Swarovski crystals!’ That’s not an exclamation. No-one would exclaim that sentence. It isn’t an abrupt, excited utterance (because that’s what an exclamation is). You can’t have ‘Swarovski’ in an exclamation. You actually can’t have Swarovski in anything to be honest, because it probably isn’t a real thing.

With ‘necklace style earbuds, which are also adorned with Swarovski crystals’ you’d be asking for trouble from all the millions of knife-wielding thieves who cross your path on a daily basis, if it weren’t for the fact that they’d doubtless be doubled-over with laughter at this ludicrous and needless gadget.

I’m in a horrible, horrible quandary about scoring the MobiBLU B153.

It’s by MobiBLU, who are illiterate and therefore lose one of their three points for that. It’s tiny, so it loses the customary point for loseability, like every other MP3 player in the world.

But then there’s the other thing - battery life. The MobiBLU B153 (I’ve also seen it called the DAH-1900 - how do you tell which meaningless number’s the right one?) has a battery life of… 153 hours. That’s the best there’s ever been. It’s just stunning.

You know what that means? A fat person could start a marathon, listening to their MobiBLU B153 and at the end of the marathon, they could STILL be listening to it. Even a fat person dressed up as a duck ‘for a laugh’ could legitimately complete a full marathon on the same battery.

Verdict: One-and-a-half out of three. I’ve given it an extra half mark for ‘doing’ radio. Really it’s just for the battery though.

Is it a sphere? Is it a cube? No, it’s a sphube.

That joke was rubbish the first time we did it and it actually made sense then. This time the answer is actually ‘no, it’s a Cubisto’, so we’ve not even told the truth.

Why the hell is it called a Cubisto anyway? I get the ‘cube’ part, but why the Italian/Spanish flavour. Perhaps their hinting at the romance languages is meant to indicate that this is a suave, desirable product. Whatever the name, it’s still square. Square’s not suave.

Square and tiny, to be precise. Easy-to-lose small, which is next on my list of MP3 player things to get annoyed about. Also on that list (headed by badly positioned upper and lower case letters) is battery life. The MobiBLU Cubisto ‘boasts’ a battery life of 10 hours. Mayflies would feel they’d got a raw deal with 10 hours.