By Kelvin Low, CNET Asia
01/07/2009
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/musicplay/0,39050463,44857459p,00.htm

Do you remember the first few MP3 players on the market? These would have been screen-less, with basic features that cost an arm and a leg. What you also got was a player that maxed out at 32MB capacity instead of the monstrous 32GB, touchscreen, Wi-Fi enabled, Bluetooth-capable, feature-loaded models we have today.

Then we heard news of theKube. Manufactured by Singapore-based Ollo Technologies, it is essentially a screen-less, microSD card-based music player that goes for only S$34.90. With much pain, we put aside our modern players aside and took a look at what theKube has to offer.

Design

There are five colors to choose from and only three buttons to control all the player's functions. At the top of the unit is an On/Off slider switch. The bottom contains the microSD/SDHC card slot, a mini-USB port and headphone port.

The play/pause button switches the playback mode between sequence or shuffle if the user holds it down when the music is paused. The forward button increases the volume when held down, and the back button does the opposite.

Features

The USB port is only for charging the player. The card slot only reads the files off the microSD card for playback and does not act as a card reader. To put music on the player, Ollo has included a USB microSD/SDHC card reader. Battery life is rated at 6 hours and takes about an hour to fully recharge.

Quite interestingly, we found MIDI file support on top of the more usual MP3, WMA, WAV and PCM formats. What's even more interesting is that this wee player accepts up to 32GB microSDHC cards.

Performance

After turning on the player, it starts to play tracks automatically in alphabetical order . A blue LED flashes whenever a button is pressed. We found that the player's startup volume is preset, which is just about right if we used the supplied earphones. Users with more sensitive earphones may find it very loud.

Navigating the device meant jabbing the forward and reverse buttons until we heard the track we wanted. This sounds really old in the world of touchscreen players, but we never had to fish out the player once to look at what we wanted.

We discovered that theKube has a selectable EQ, quite by accident. Holding the play/pause button down while the music is playing turns the EQ off. And with that, we decided to hook it up to the PC for the RightMark Audio Analyzer test.



The included earphones may look cheap, but at least they sound decent enough, considering that the entire package costs less than a high-grade in-ear headphone. The battery life is short, hovering around the 5.5-hour mark, and we found ourselves plugging theKube into a USB port whenever we had the chance to.

What really annoyed us was that the player does not remember the last playback settings when you turn it off. That said, we managed to live with the player for almost a week and did not experience any high-tech withdrawal symptoms. However, we did miss the fast-forward and backward feature since the usual buttons have been unusually assigned as the volume control.

Because of its odd cube-styled body, theKube is definitely not going to find a comfortable place in your pocket. The solution is to either throw it into a bag or clip it to clothes. Quite surprisingly, despite not having a hold function, unwanted presses were rare occurrences.

Conclusion

We would like to have seen Ollo integrate a card reader into theKube, instead of having to resort to an extra card reader. That said, if you need a very cheap basic MP3 player that sounds good and aren't particular about branding or features, this player might just win the day for you.