MP3 Gaze

Trekstor have broken me. If you’ve read any of my previous Trekstor reviews, you’ll know that I’ve been writing them in one go, but I can’t go on.

This is my seventh i.Beat review. There are six further i.Beats of various forms. I really, really don’t know what the difference between them is, other than the look. Maybe that’s the whole point. I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t go on.

I can’t write how much I hate Trekstor’s approach to spelling one more time. They never gave me anything else to latch onto. The i.Beats are all the same and they’re all very, very dull.

I’m going to go and do something more spiritually rewarding now, like repeatedly punching myself in the face.

I tend to write these posts in bulk for each manufacturer. I’m midway through the Trekstor range and I’m already filled with a quite tangible sense of hatred.

It’s the childish, seemingly random, needlessly moronic naming policy they seem to have. I was about to start this sentence with ’sweez’ for example. Then I noticed that it’s not got a capital letter. If I put ’sweez’ at the start of the sentence, it looks like I’ve made a typo and I can’t stand that. If I put ‘Sweez’, it’s wrong and I hate that too.

What the bloody hell is ’sweez’ anyway? It’s nothing. It’s nothing at all. It’s just a stupid series of letters that need taking outside and being given a damn good shoeing.

During my third review, I noticed that it was ‘TrekStor’ and not ‘Trekstor’ as well. I’m not changing all the other reviews though. In fact, I’m sticking with ‘Trekstor’ even though it’s wrong. If the company themselves wilfully disregard anything approaching standards, why should I bow to theirs.

I can’t even be bothered looking at the specs for this MP3 player, I’m so annoyed. If you buy it you’re an idiot who funds other idiots - that’s all you need to know.

“TrekStor has received an order from Russian-Canadian billionaire and owner of the Midland Formula 1 team, Alex Shnaider, to develop the world’s most expensive MP3 player.”

Note that he didn’t request, say, ‘the world’s best MP3 player’. He requested the most expensive. Foolishly, Trekstor went down the ‘making it gold and gluing on some diamonds’ route.

What I’d have done would have been to pick the cheapest MP3 player in their range, drawn a dollar sign on it and charged him a million of the currency of his choice - preferably British pounds because they’re so much bigger than any other currency.

I could cry. I could literally break down and cry for about a week. Why does it have to end with an X? There really is NO NEED.

Trekstor’s i.Beat Organix comes with a ‘neck strap’ which you can probably organise into a sort of makeshift noose with which to end it all once you’ve wallowed in the profound pointlessness of a world where people randomly alter spellings solely so that a terrible product will seem infinitesimally cooler.

It doesn’t happen with cheese or electricity or anything else they make you buy. Why are MP3 players so at risk?

I’m really struggling to differentiate between Trekstor’s products. They’re all much of a muchness with no stand-out features.

All I can presume is that they name their MP3 players according to colour and shape and otherwise they’re all identical. This seems a hollow marketing strategy.

If everything’s going to be an i.Beat as well, why not just do away with the term? It’s just making the name longer. That’s all.

I know what you’re thinking: ‘Is that an exclamation mark I see in the middle of that word?’ But before you do anything rash against Trekstor, bear in mind that their website features lots of pictures of that singer woman, P!nk, next to this MP3 player, so presumably it’s her fault.

On the other hand, is that a lower case ‘i’ then a dot at the start of the product name? It is, you know. Everything’s ‘i’ these days. You can’t buy anything invented post-1920 without it having a rogue ‘i’ at the start. It’s meaningless now. Stop it.

Trekstor’s i.Beat P!nk comes in 1GB or 2GB memory size and features earphones and operating instructions, which is a bonus.

When did the letter Z get to be so cool? You know it is. Take any word with an S in and any right-thinking cool person will ZubZtitute it for a Z.

No, wait. What am I thinking? Improper use of letters isn’t cool. Sticking to linguistic conventions is what separates us from birds, fish and child-molesters. Calling something ‘Vibez’ is particularly bad because the word ‘vibes’ conjurs images of no-taste morons nodding approvingly at simplistic, soulless music.

There should be a capital V too of course, but it’s pretty much standard practice not to bother with that. Pretty soon we’ll all be praying at cairns made of small stones and wearing loin cloths again. That’s the way it’s going. Mark my words. You call this progress? This isn’t progress.

So the Trekstor vibez then. Er, it’s got a huge amount of memory, it’s ever-so-slightly too small and its battery life is borderline by today’s standards - today’s standards are, of course, abysmally low.

Verdict: One out of three. It holds more songs than you can listen to with five sets of batteries.