MP3 Gaze

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.

It’s a case for Creative’s Zen Vision:M. Conico say it’s brown on their website. It’s clearly yellow.

There’s no international definition of the various colours. It’s because colour’s a continuum rather than being made up of discrete, identifiable units.

Women tend to identify more colours than men, for example. Women have colours like ‘mauve’, ‘eggshell’ and ‘purple’. Weird stuff like that. Men just have red, green, blue and yellow. So a woman might differentiate between red and scarlet, whereas for a man, both would be red.

Either way, I think we can all agree that this case is yellow and not brown.

I’ve an aversion to platinum. Platinum’s become synonymous with self-granted status symbols.

A platinum credit card is a way of saying that even though you’re spending someone else’s money, you’re spending it on Bentleys and holidays in Mauritius. It also says that you’re the kind of person who pays attention to what your credit card looks like and the effect it will have on the cashiers in ASDA.

Australian cricketer Matthew Hayden once revealed that he and some of his fellow batsmen called themselves ‘the platinum club‘. If this isn’t the most juvenile posturing you’ve ever heard from an adult, I’d like to know what is.

Sumvision’s Platinum Pro MP4 player: Are you the sort of person who wants something ‘platinum’?

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.

I love ATMT’s Storm MP3 player. Shall I tell you why? It’s because it’s got an actual name. An actual name that you can remember rather than a meaningless series of letters and numbers.

You know where you are with ‘Storm’. It’s a form of punishing weather. Memorable.

Plus, it appears to be able to walk around using its headphones as makeshift legs. That’s a trick I’ve never seen an iPod pull off.

There are some specifications on ATMT’s site, but it says that they’re subject to change without prior notice, so what’s the point in reproducing them? Just so long as they don’t change the name. Or the headphone legs.

I’ve just realised all the endless fun you could have putting it in a teacup as well.

Verdict: Two out of three - a new leader.

Here’s a conundrum for you: You’ve got the equivalent of 1,400 CDs on your MP3 player, but you’ve only got ‘up to 16 playback hours’. How do you justify that?

Obviously you don’t always want to listen to the exact same things and I understand that all your music’s there as an option, should you fancy a listen, but it still seems like a massive disparity to me.

Could a fat person run a marathon inside 16 hours? Possibly not. So is 16 hours sufficient battery life for a portable music player? No, it isn’t.

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.

A nexus is a connection or the centre of something. This seems like quite a grand claim on behalf of an MP4 player.

Altogether too many MP3 and MP4 players have got names that are trying to be cool. The campaign for intriguing, low-key or even embarrassing names starts here.

Some suggestions:

At least it’s not just a random set of numbers, I suppose. Small mercies.

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.

That’s X-Seven and not X7. Or Eks-7, I guess. I don’t know why. You write numbers up to ten in full if you work for a local newspaper, so maybe that’s the market ATMT are targeting.

The X-Seven supports ‘WOW’. That’s either the sound of awe elicited from co-workers when they see your beautifully rectangular MP3 player or it means that you can experience the world’s geekiest and least-productive pastime, World Of Warcraft on the X-Seven.

Can’t see it being either really, but you try searching ‘WOW’ and see what you come up with.

As far as I can tell, Tevion specialise in producing technological goods for that top-end supermarket, Aldi.

I got my telly from Aldi and it’s great. It did go through a period where it made a constant whistling sound for about six months, but that seems to have passed now. Either that or I’ve just got used to it.

Tevion’s MP3 player will be monumentally cheaper than anything else on the market. Dare you take the plunge? How much of a cheapskate are you?

I’m a colossal cheapskate. I’m not sure I’ll even bother splashing out on this, I’m so cheap.

Apparently, the iRiver H320 allows you to read eBooks. Hands up who wants to take their chances reading a whole book on a two inch screen.

That two inch screen boasts 260,000 colours, which is a good many more colours than I can think of. iRiver don’t name the colours covered. But I believe that the iRiver H320 is blue-compatible and can also handle yellow and even magnolia.

It’s probably too small and runs out of battery life really quickly. I haven’t checked, but that’s the case with 99 percent of MP3 players and I don’t see why this one should be any different.

Prepare for ACTION!

It’s got a ’sturdy’ clip, because you know how much you bounce around when you’re being fit, healthy and active.

I know you. You’re a cool action type. You’re the kind of person who appears in promotional photographs for MP3 players. You’re trim, relaxed and “happy”. So are all your “friends”. You’ll need your Sansa C100 to be secure when you’re doing your triathlon training.

Alternatively, if you strap your Sansa C100 to your arm, at least you’ll know where it is when you wake up amongst all the detritus of your worthless life. Is it under the TV remote? Inside that pizza box? No, it’s right there, strapped to your flabby arm.

Why not get your iPod engraved?

Here are some suggestions as to what you could have written:

“I hate my iPod so much, I had it burnt with a laser.”

“We’re all individuals.”

“Recharge battery.”

“Why can’t Apple make bigger iPods so I can write something good on it.”

“iPod? iRiver? What’s the difference?”

“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.