Turning Rebellion Into Money

Oh crap.

I've not blogged for days.

It's not exactly that there's nothing happening in my life, but:

1. I'm too lazy to blog about what few things are blogworthy

2. I'm short on photos

3. Most of my life isn't blogworthy


Someone, please. Tell me something fun and blogworthy to do!

Looks like I don't really need to do a full iPod Nano 3G review. But here's some short and sweet notes about it.

It's a cool little thing, and by cool, I mean totally sweet.



1. Back when it was newly-released, everyone gawked at photos online and then promptly did a double take. It looked fat, it looked big and the colours were totally horrible - red that looks like powder pink, all the colours look like they're iPod Little Tikes Edition. And everyone more or less decided that the designers should be lined up against the wall and shot.

Turns out, it was the marketing team that rightfully deserved the firing squad. I'm not kidding when I say they look way smaller in real life. And the colours are more or less similar to the previous generation iPod Nanos, just that the photos screwed up big.

It fits my palm quite snugly, and I'm pretty surprised that it gives my old Sony Walkman flash player a good run for its money when it comes to size. It's fatter, but shorter and way thinner.

2. Cover Flow on both iTunes and iPod rock. But before that, you'd have to spend considerable effort embedding the album artwork into the files using mp3 Tag or similar.

3. Battery life is goooooood. Officially it's 24h, but iLounge got 30 sweet hours outta it.

4. Sound quality? Well, that's the Achilles's Heel about it. It's pretty average for a MP3 player, which means it doesn't sound crystal-clear and thumpy like my old Sony. Anecdotal reports state that the sound quality is pretty on par with the previous generation iPod Nanos, and slightly inferior to the full-sized iPods.

5. Holy cow, it's nice to have 8 whopping gigabytes,

6. iTunes. Love it or hate it, but either way, it takes a whole lotta getting used to. I particularly like the search box in the top right corner. Type the album name, artist name or song name, and the search results appear as you type. Leet. Oh, did I mention Cover Flow rocks? I'm one of the old school guys who still remember albums by the album artwork, so there, it's schweeeet.

7. You need a proprietary cable to connect it to your computer. No run-of-the-mill USB cables. Bah.

8. Comes in a schweeet anodised green (I had actually bought a cover for my Nokia 8250 aeons ago that was a similar matt green) which is, in any case, pretty hard to resist.

9. But all that's said and done, it's really one of only 3 options you can choose from if you want 8GB of flash storage at a decent price.

Meizu m6
China brand, known for its sound quality and low price of less than $300. However, what out me off is the dubious warranty.

There is no official Meizu agent in Singapore, and when I ask about the warranty, it sounds to me like a 'we'll send it to our importer who'll try to butcher this thing by themselves and hope that sparks don't fly.'

Comes in plain black and white, and they're honestly pretty bland and unattractive. And it isn't anodised aluminium with a shiny steel back like the Nano is.

Creative Zen
At exactly $1 pricier than the iPod nano, it has a bigger screen, and supposedly better sound quality. But still, I wasn't impressed auditioning it at the showroom with my own earphones.

What turned me off is that Apple's user interface is way more intuitive - 5 minutes of fiddling and you're good to go - while the Creative lays so many buttons on the audio player it makes a DVD player's remote control look uncluttered. And well, who can resist the sweetness of a click wheel or similar touchpad-like navigation? And it isn't anodised aluminium with a shiny steel back like the Nano is.

But hey, it has a SD card expansion port, that works for up to 4GB, so that's pretty leet by itself.