by
Too many Es. Too many Es!
“Be bold, be brave, and show everyone who you are! The all new ZEN Neeon 2 gives you infinite freedom to confidently express your individuality. Personalize your player with exciting new Stik-On™ themes, and a matching backplate color.”
Creative tell you that you’ve got infinite freedom and then immediately afterwards tell you the constraints of this ‘infinite freedom’: You can stick stuff on the front of your ZEN Neeon 2.
Not just anything, mind. You can’t choose from a broad palette of potential stick-on themes. You can use the Creative-approved ‘Stik-On’ brand and NO OTHER.
This is particularly bad news for me, because literally the only way I can express my individuality is through stick-on themes. I have no other outlet. No-one will recognise me ever again. Creative have rendered me a faceless drone with their draconian stick-on theme regime.
by
“Wake Up to exceptional sound!”
No, no, no. Wake up gradually in complete silence. ‘Exceptional sound’ would be far too frightening.
GEAR4’s HouseParty speakers are an alarm, radio and speakers for your iPod - if you’ve got one. Technology writers never seem to consider that maybe, just maybe, not everybody owns an iPod.
I’m a bit troubled by the 24/7 aspect of the name as well. Is there no off switch? Speakers are only of benefit part of the time. Sometimes you don’t want noise. Sometimes its distracting. Of course, if you’ve got an iPod, you’re probably the kind of person who’s ‘up’ all day every day.
I’m rarely, if ever, ‘up’. I wake up in the morning in only the most technical sense. Eight hours later, I have a brief window of ‘up’-ness when the coffee’s kicked in, but before the day’s worn me down. It’s a about 12 minutes long. Some days this doesn’t happen at all. Having speakers blaring ‘exceptional sound’ 24/7 would really start to irritate me quite quickly.
by
All Intempo’s products look weird. That’s okay. It makes life interesting.
In my head, this is a space hopper for your iPod. iPods can seem a bit serious at times. They’re a bit too knowingly cool. It must be exhausting for the poor devices. Well what better way to let your portable music tool off the leash than to give it a quick blast on a space hopper. Everyone loves space hoppers - even glorified memory sticks with headphones stuck in them.
It’s an iPod dock. I’ve still got nothing to say about iPod docks, as you can probably tell.
by
On first glance, this is quite pleasing. It’s just a box with a hole in. That appeals to me.
There’s no design here. It’s not even a self-conscious ‘design that’s not a design’. At least I don’t think it is. I don’t really know how you tell, but to me, this is just a box and not: ‘Look at me. I don’t go in for design. My iPod dock’s just a box.’
You may think there’s no difference between those two concepts - after all, you still end up with the same thing. There is a difference though. It’s the difference between a box because it never occurred to anyone to design it any differently and a box because the manufacturers have gone through all the other designs and think that ‘a box will say more’.
The fact that there’s no space in ‘BodyRocket’ rather indicates that maybe I’m wrong and this is the bad kind of box. But I’m feeling generous.
by
This is a quite monumentally dull MP3 player. Not that memory sticks with headphones plugged into them are particularly exciting, but even in the world of MP3 players, this is dull.
Average memory (256MB, 512MB or 1GB), average to quite poor battery life (17 hours), dull name.
I can’t find the physical dimensions, so let’s say that it’s four feet long to liven things up a bit. It doubles up as a robust suitcase.
by
Now this is revolutionary. iRiver have neatly side-stepped the whole tiny screen problem afflicting most MP3 players with video capabilities. They’ve made almost the whole of the U10 MP3 player a screen.
They’ve achieved this by including NO BUTTONS on it. Not one. I think you do stuff by jabbing at the screen with your finger, biro, flick-knife or used syringe. It looks like there’s a power switch on the side, which is a bit disappointing. It’d be better if you had to say ‘power on’ in a commanding, Jean-Luc Picard-style baritone. Never mind. No buttons is a good start.
So what are the drawbacks? Well I’m guessing that the battery life for video is embarrassing, because iRiver’s press release only states that it’s “up to 34 hours of playback for MP3 songs”. It’s what they DON’T tell you that’s crucial.
Another problem is that despite being all screen, iRiver have compensated for this, not by making the screen bigger, but by making the U10 smaller. It’s under 7cm long. I don’t know about you, but if I can lose a TV remote that’s twice the size, all the while knowing it’s within the room, I can sure as hell lose an MP3 player that’s the size of half a pencil.
by
It’s so hard to know what the difference between some MP3 players is. Maybe it’s our habit of only looking at the dimensions, memory size, battery life and the name of each product that hampers us.
The NW-E015F is part of Sony’s NW series or its NW-E series or maybe their E015F series. Who knows? Here’s what I do know.
Dimensions: 8cm long - too small.
Memory size: 2GB.
Battery life: Sony are a bit vague, but it looks to be 27 hours. That’s okay. Good even.
Name: NW-E015F - worldbeatingly unmemorable. Say what you like about the Squircle. At least you can remember it.
by
I think iDS stands for iPod Docking System or somesuch. That’s what it is anyway. In truth, I only decided to feature it because I saw the name in the Argos catalogue and thought it sounded good. ‘Intempo’.
As you might expect, I was a bit disappointed to find out it was just an iPod dock. What do you say about an iPod dock?
I think I might be fundamentally against iPod docks. Their main role is to help portable, personal audio devices function as stationary ones that everyone can listen to. I can see the use, but I just feel it’s a bit too ‘all your eggs in one basket’. What if someone accidentally smashes your iPod into pieces with a hammer? You can’t guard against an eventuality like that.
by
It’s a case for your iPod Shuffle and it’s made of metal.
It’s got holes in it so that you can press the buttons and that.
The place where we saw it for sale was selling them in threes. A red one, a black one and a white one.
I’m not really pulling out all the stops for this update.
by
The ATMT DAB Radio and MP3 Player’s aerial IS the headphones. Ingenious. I’m slightly disappointed to learn that the headphones don’t feature a huge wire circle protruding above your head, but still.
The battery life of the ATMT DAB MP3 No-Words-Just-Letters-And-Numbers is 50 hours for MP3s and just 15 hours for DAB. I never realised how energy-hungry digital radio was until recently. Maybe it uses extra power when it makes people’s voices go all robotic from time to time. Or is that just that the signal’s bad?
by
Putting aside the whole ‘what happens if someone’s trying to tell you about a falling piano’ thing, how do Shure’s E2c sound isolating earphones compare to noise-cancelling headphones? It’s what we’re all wondering. We’re all doubled up with the agony of our own ignorance.
The answer is as follows: “Their sound isolating sleeves block 2 to 7 times more noise than noise cancelling headphones”.
That’s more and they don’t need batteries, so I guess that ’sound isolation’ is better than ‘noise cancellation’. Begs the question as to what ‘cancelling’ means these days though, doesn’t it?
by
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.
by
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.
by
Why not laminate your iPod?
It’s an ultra-thin coating to protect your iPod from scratches and so forth. I’m not quite sure why it’s specifically for the iPod nano. They must have just cut the rubbery sheets to be that exact size.
Here’s an idea: Customizable ultra-thin MP3 player coatings. It’s just a sheet of sticky rubber stuff and you can make it whatever size you want with Moshi’s special ’scissors for iGlaze’.
by
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.
