I get a ride into work from Melissa on her way to school. My commute home, however, I walk. This is where I really need the music and what portable means to me. It means it's rugged enough to fall into my pocket with whatever's there and survive a jarring ride without skipping.
Skipping is a must, but only when I tell it to. My taste changes on a song by song basis and I don't necessarily know what it is. The current solution is to play all music on shuffle and just skip songs I'm not in the mood for. I do this until I find something I like. On rare occasions I've tried a playlist or two, a specific album or artist, but it's nearly inevitable that I end up turning back to pure chaos.
Thus the Carbon does not meet my needs for a rugged, random, skippable player. It's a sweet little baby that I wanted dearly to fall madly in love with, but it was just not meant to be. I plan on trying it again, but on my first trip home it rebooted on me twice and skipped a bit on a handful of songs. Being unfamiliar with the shape and feel, I had some difficulty pulling it out of my pocket and effectively doing what I do: skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip back, skip back, skip, play.
It's achilles heel isn't so much that it has a hard drive, but that it tries to play every song right away. This works great when you're playing songs in sequence, because there's almost no pause in between them, versus my S35S which has about a half-second to a second delay. However, when you're a skipper, like myself, it slows down the skipping itself to a crawl. This means listening less and handling more, which is bad. The more time I spend skipping, the less I am paying attention to all the bad drivers in Redmond trying to kill me on the way to a latte. I'd prefer a second or two second delay between an initial skip and an attempt to play the song.
The feel of skipping is a little different, because there's a button under your thumb, resting between the skip back and skip forward. I didn't particularly enjoy this, which caused me to spend an extra dozen milliseconds carefully skipping rather than just mashing the button like I do right now. Gingerly is the word I'd use to describe my handling it, which may seem appropriate to other people, but not to me. I want portable to mean solid and rugged, not just portable as in moving it from place to place. My laptop is portable, but it's not my music player.
Anyway, suffice to say my hockey puck still fits more of the bill and I'll continue using it over the Carbon. However, I'd just like to point out two huge pro's of the Carbon: 1.) you can read/write any file from it (a la external storage device) and it can play back any music it finds (without translating it to a proprietary format) and 2.) it has 5gb of space compared to my 384mb.
0 comments:
Post a Comment