Gibdon Moon

Hopeless technology romantic is an apt title for this nerd. While I tend to be extremely picky about the devices and software allowed into the loving embrace of daily use, I'm also easily led on after a sweet first impression to having my heart broken. After years of toting around a repeatedly resilient red hockey puck (aka Rio Sport) as my preferred pocketable (e.g. more than portable) music player, I switched to a Creative Labs MuVo v100, white 2gb. It has proven itself worthy to warm itself on my hot hips as I grind them in an effort to hoof it from place to place. Let me drum up the positives first:

• Small Form Factor. There is an over-used phrase in portable electronics that goes "nearly the size of a pack of gum" (or "credit card"), but the comparison is well justified with the MuVo. It resembles a pack of gum, one which does not contain contents chewy or sticky thus making it unlikely to stick to your dental work.
  
  
• Flash Drive Freedom. My brief foray into hardrive-based players a few years ago (iPod and and Creative Labs Zen or something) stemmed from a desire to keep all of my music in one storage unit which would be carried with me and used in conjunction with my choice of hardware at hand. That is, I wanted to be able to play my tunes from the computer, using its controls and sound mixing. Things may be different now, but those dreams were mercelessly crushed by annoying DRM-inspired databases which effectively segregated your player's storage into "user files" or "music which you can't get to except through iTunes and which you can't play except through the player's controls". Needless to say I didn't own these things for long and reverted back to the rugged Rio.
  
  Where was I going with this? Oh yes! The MuVo isn't just a place for random files, it's a shared storage for those and your actual music files. The transfers are two-way so you not only have the ability to drag music onto it and have it work through the player, but you can copy it off or even stream it from your software player of choice when it's plugged into your computer.
  
  
• Control on the Go. There's some very simple and very useful features on this little hunk of plastic that I didn't get to experience before: Favorites and Deleting Songs. The former is merely a method to mark and playback certain songs you're currently obsessed with and the latter is a way to get rid of those which have lost their luster and fallen from your fancy. When you're working with a limited selection of music, it's sometimes difficult to determine what to clear off when you're making room for a new album or two. The ability to delete a song you no longer care for when you hear it definitely helps more than I would have imagined.

With the glowing part of this review out of the way, it's time to lay down some cons:

• Ruffle by Shuffle. As a skipper (one who sets "play all" and then proceeds to skip unwanted advances on my ear drum) I rely heavily on the shuffle and random features. The MuVo falls short with a short-term memory, perhaps none at all, which causes it to repeat itself more often than I would like. I find myself skipping more often than I did with the Rio due to this redundancy. I would not define their feature as shuffle, because to me that means it rifles through everything and creates a psuedo-random order (as the Rio did) which prevents repition until the list has been exhausted. This is more like a dynamic psuedo-random system where the following song is chosen on the fly by a jump. It certainly keeps track of the previous song so you can skip back, but powering it off makes it forget and I don't think it keeps a very long list. On one walk I had a song play twice within a half hour.
  
  
• Button Badness. You might think that a squarish form would benefit the purpose of this device, allowing it to fit comfortably near other hard-lined items in one's pockets. Unfortunately the results of playing Tetris with this in your pocket is a lot of button mashing causing it to stop playing, skip songs, or at the far end of the plausability spectrum, deleting songs. I theorize the creators intended it more for arm-bands than for pockets.
  
  
• Fat USB Key. It won't fit in all USB ports, because it has a bit of a "belly" that protrudes outward. Some front-exposed ports, Dell cases in particular, are also unforgiving of this extra bulk due to their aesthetics. This is a shame, but I have a hard time figuring out how this could be fixed aside from having a mini-USB port instead of having the plug on the device itself (which might also make the unit smaller).
  
  
• Boundless Batteries. There's two issues here: 1.) it uses a single triple AAA battery which means you're SOL if it runs out even if you're by an outlet where it might otherwise charge (both a blessing and curse?) and 2.) it sucks juice even when off, possibly because it has a soft-power-button instead of a hard switch; I'd prefer the latter for more control. My work-around is to unplug it from its battery-half when I'm not using it.

Harping on its limited capacity and bland style isn't really worth it. You buy this thing for its practical application, not an overhyped pretty paper weight. I don't know if these will go the way of the dodo or have a nice revision, but here's a couple suggestions to its makers:

• Power Switch It. As an exploratory companion, I need to ration my consumption of resources and that includes what little current is drawn from the batteries I load into the MuVo. Here's a crazy thought: the headphone jack could be a spring-loaded switch, i.e. its off unless they're plugged in.
  
  
• Latch Key Kid. Plugging the key part into the battery pack is a cinch, but a simple latch around the end would make it feel more secure. It's barely wobbly, but it is a little wobbly, and the last thing I want is to bend the USB connector.
  
  
• Fix the Shuffle. I don't understand why this feature sucks so bad, seriously. I wouldn't even mind giving it a little time to shuffle; the instant on-demand method it has now is fine and dandy but the repeats are not. At the very least it could keep a memory trail in a file on its storage so it doesn't do this.

Whew, well that's something I've been meaning to get across for months now! Hopefully some potential users, perhaps even Creative Labs, find this useful.