although I have since been sucked into the Apple culture (grudgingly) I used to rebel against it
to the point where I thought- why am I going to spend £120 on an iPod Nano (or £250 for an iPod Touch) to do music/video stuff when there's a perfectly good 2.5" Touch Screen multimedia player that more importantly RECOGNISES AND PLAYS .MKV AND .dIVX/.XVID/MP4 FILES which of course consist of the main portion of my video downloads. Plus it's a radio and a games thingy and a photo viewer and it has a built in camera.... for £40!!!! Gotta get me one of those.

At first, all was rosy. My, isn't it cute and dinky? Isn't it LIGHT! (erm...in hindsight make that small and cheap-looking and fragile feeling). It did play the promised downloaded dodgy pirate format films OK but the battery life wasn't good enough for more than 30 minutes- ah well, so I'll just have to power it through the USB socket- not a problem. The MP3 player menu structure was bizarre and the direcctory structure was alphabetical, ignoring the order songs appeared in an album which was annoying but Meh. It was actually powerful enough on the headphones output to be Loud, and the EQ settings were quite good as well- no eardrum-preserving gain reduction here! Carry on.

Then the touch screen stopped working and after numerous recalibrations if still had a massive offset. Then the chrome trim around the screen popped off (cheap nasty glue). The games were shit. The radio reception was awful. The photo viewer auto-rotated pictures incorrectly. The camera resolution was a pitiful 320*240.

But still, £40 eh?

As it turns out, where it still functions- it's still usable as a rather fat 4 gigabyte memory card (mini USB lead permitting) and so I do not feel totally ripped off. But the moral? If it looks too good to be true etc. then even if it seems good on the surface, it won't last.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 29 Sep 2011, 18:58, Reply)