MP3 Gaze

MP3 players are NOT gumshields.

Get a left jab in the chops and you’ll lose your teeth, you imbecile.

So, to confirm: Samsung YP-T6. Not a gumshield.

What the frig is this MP3 player called?

The header of the press release says ‘T9′. The first line of that press release refers to it as ‘the YP-T9′ and then, two lines later, it’s branded, ‘the YP-T9JAB’.

Fortunately, the press release ends there, otherwise Samsung would doubtless tack on a few more meaningless letters to confuse the issue further.

Whatever it is, it comes with some Flash games, including “Baseball” and “Pizza Delivery”. The latter sounds like a winner and should shift a few units for Samsung simply through its presence.

Six? That’s crap.

The standard of kleptomania in this country is really at rock bottom.

This is fantastic. Samsung are now my favourite MP3 player manufacturers. Although it’s a hollow honour, being as I hate all the other ones.

Just look at this. It’s an MP3 player in the style of a pocket watch.

Perhaps this will herald a return to the Victorian mentality here in England.

You’ll be dining in your gentleman’s club, as is your custom, when Edmund will wager that you can’t cross the Kalahari desert in less than the time it will take him to sell his late aunt Winifred’s house.

“Very well,” you answer. “I will leave immediately.”

So off you trot, in your top hat and suit with a cane and this pocket watch/MP3 player. You’ll remain in this garb throughout your adventure, never once batting an eyelid at the most punishing hardship. Walking bolt-upright, top hat attached, never once losing your composure.

You succeed and on your return you reveal to Edmund that you also calculated the density of the moon while you were away, as well as charting the migratory paths of four different sorts of bird - one previously undiscovered.

Fergie’s an idiot. Don’t get Samsung’s K5. It’ll only encourage them to use her again.

Look at that dress.

Look at that face.

And is that a crest behind her? Fergie doesn’t have a crest or a coat of arms or whatever. She doesn’t have a surname. Crests are for surnames.

(Or does she not have a first name?)

It’s ‘the slimmest subscription-enabled MP3 Player on the market’. You’d think everybody would be jumping on that bandwagon.

4GB, up to 20 hours playing time and the keypad lights up.

I’ve no real insight into this product. Michael Vaughan’s closing on a hundred in the Headingley Test against the West Indies as I write this, so I’m a bit distracted. Can’t see anything about radio for Samsung’s K3, so you probably couldn’t listen to Test Match Special with it.

Rubbish.

A helix is a twisted, spiral sort of shape. Samsung’s Helix isn’t a helix.

Helix also manufactured ’shatter resistant’ rulers when I was a kid. Fittingly, we always tried to test the shatter resistance of these rulers by attempting to bend them into a helix. To a child ’shatter resistant’ means ‘indestructable’.

I now realise that all it meant was that when you broke the ruler by trying to make it into a helix, it snapped cleanly rather than smashing into hundreds of shards.

Can’t wait to see how this Helix breaks. Probably by being sat on while residing in a back pocket, I’d guess.

Samsung say: “Just clip this super-slim flash player onto your belt and you’re ready to go!”

Go where? Where the hell would you dare go with anything strapped to your belt? Has no-one told Samsung that if you have something affixed to your belt, you’re instantly uncool.

It’s because it’s ‘practical’. Being practical is very, very, deeply uncool.

I should know.

Samsung’s Nexus 25 can receive live XM Radio reception when connected to a home docking station or car dock. Surely the home and the car are two places where you can quite easily get radio reception. At least you could last time I checked, which was in 1996.

This may be a slightly unfair criticism, but I think it looks boring as well. Ordinarily I consider the appearance of MP3 players to be entirely irrelevant. It’s a sign that I’ve been looking at too many of late.

The K5 has ‘a heavy portfolio’ according to Samsung. That’s what I look for in an MP3 player. How about you?

The K5 features a slide-out speaker system, which is pretty clever. You too could be really, really hated by everyone on the train.

Or you could sell your stereo and use the K5 at home and be just a little bit disappointed that the tiny speaker doesn’t quite live up to your expectations.

I quite like the look of Samsung’s YP-T8A. What have I become?

What kind of a man actually experiences ‘opinions’ about the appearance of a technological contraption? A very sad one.

I need to find something to ridicule about the YP-T8A to restore my faith in myself. You can play ‘motion detecting games’ with it. That’s quite laughable. My eyes can detect motion. I don’t consider it a game.

Oh, it’s about three inches long as well, which is stupidly small. The world’s gone metric now as well. No-one measures in inches. Still, too small’s too small whatever unit you measure it in.

Samsung have at least got the decency to give their product a vaguely memorable name, but then they go and ruin it by putting a capital letter in the middle. Capital letters don’t go in the middle. All you’re doing is making the word annoying to read.

The NeXus’s big boast is that it can receive XM Radio, which is, apparently, satellite radio. I live in the UK and I don’t think we have XM radio over here and even if we did, no-one would listen to it, because it would be precisely as bad as normal radio, only you’d need special contraptions to hear it.

The specifications say that the NeXus is 3.4″ long, which is a bizarre decimalisation of imperial measurements, if I’m not much mistaken.