The new girl

Like I said, I met a new girl over the weekend, and I love her already. Her name is Shirley, and here she is, posing with the Madagascar animals here at the office.



What, you really thought it was a girl? You should know better by now.

(Jona just told me over IM, "Mukhang mas okay yan sa totoong girlfriend ah, hindi pa yan tumitingin kung may kotse o wala. Low-maintenance pa.")

Anyway, she's a Creative Muvo2 1.5GB player. I got her last week, a few hours before our trip to Galera, for a little less than Php10,000, and it came with a free FM wired remote.

On to the questions:

So why not an iPod?
Well, because I couldn't really afford an iPod. Actually, I could have bought an iPod if I really wanted to, but I just didn't want to fork over the extra cash. I'm not really a fan of the iPod (or Apple) and in the end, while I would have bought an iPod if I had more money, an iPod just wasn't compelling enough for me to buy.

Why this one, then?
Well, it's the cheapest MP3 player on the market that's got more than 1GB, so it strikes a nice balance between the big hard drive-based players and flash-based ones.

Is it good?
It's plenty good. It stores around 500 songs (MP3 format), and acts as a USB mass-storage device when plugged in to Windows, so no more need for drivers or any sort of installation when using it on another computer.

Also, the audio sounds absolutely fantastic, so much so that if you hear news that I've been run over by a car on the street, it's probably because of this. But seriously, the audio is brilliant, especially on a well-engineered album like The Killers' Hot Fuss or even Session Road's Suntok sa Buwan.

Oh, and the wired remote has an FM tuner, if ever I need a 90.7 Love Radio fix, and there are 30 presets, para 'di na talaga kailangan i-memorize yan.

The unit is tiny, around the size of a 20-peso bill folded in half, which makes it easy to store in the pocket even if you've got other stuff there.

Ok, what don't you like about it?
This is really just nitpicking, but the LCD screen is too small (only two lines). This isn't really a problem, except for the fact that you can't create playlists on the fly. Not a big problem for me, because I prefer listening to whole albums, and I get pretty OC when organizing music files. The buttons on the unit are also a little small, but it's something I could live with.

Also, for the past couple of days, I've been having problems transferring files into the unit when plugged in to the USB cable, with the unit seemingly hanging during transfer. I was about to get support when I tried the unit with another USB cable, the one I use for my camera, and the transfers went without a hitch.


Over-all, I love it. The biggest thing is that it helps me with my insomnia; I found that out during at Galera, where I bunked next to Oliver, whose snoring is comparable to a jackhammer. I just plugged in my earphones, and I've been able to sleep. It's become a habit now for me before I go to bed, and will probably continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

Labels: showbiz

- posted by jaemark @ 6/02/2005 01:32:00 AM