Technika MP3 player

...it won't switch on. The Technika has no way of doing this so I have to make sure I don't knock the off button while I'm listening to it and then find somewhere safe to put it when I'm not using it. Unfortunately I am not the tidiest person and in fact wherever I considered was a safe place to put it last night has completely escaped me this morning. A good solution to this is to just take the battery out when it is floating around your bag, which ...
...again.

~Carrying~
A minor point but added to this is the fact that it doesn't have a belt clip. It does have a little loop so you can tie some string round it, but you need to find some way of positioning it so it doesn't bang against you if you're running and turn itself off. Plan B, which I'm going to try later, is to tie it round my waist with some ribbon and then tuck it into the waistband of my tracksuit.

... more

I seem to start all my reviews with some brief autobiographical notes so here goes...

~~The Autobiography of my MP3 use~~

My MP3 player broke. I was not happy. One of the reasons I wasn't happy was that it had reached that perfect state of being old, out-moded and shabby which meant no-one would be tempted to steal it on my upcoming Round the World trip and I wouldn't care if they did. Now I had to find another old, out-moded and shabby MP3 player to take with me. In the meantime I was stuck training for Race for Life in silence (unless I sang to myself and, being a Reception Teacher, I am only really confident on the lyrics to Nursery Rhymes. You get funny looks jogging round the local park singing 3 Blind Mice, believe me)

That's when I spotted these little babies in Tesco for only £4.97. I couldn't quite believe it. After umming and ahhing over whether this was the most foolish purchasing decision ever I threw caution to the wind and handed over a crisp £5 note. The change, being conveniently in coppers, went into my Round-the-World penny jar. Every little helps, as they say.

~~The vital statistics~~

Price: £4.97
Size: 8 ½ cm by 2 cm
Colour: Like the famous Model T you can have any colour, as long as it's black.
Memory: 256 MB. On the front of the pack it helpfully tells you this is enough to hold roughly 80 songs in case you are not an MP3 enthusiast who knows about these things- a fairly safe bet if you are buying your MP3 from a supermarket for under a fiver. Mine is full and has only 62 tracks on but maybe they are big ones....

Buttons: There are 3, plus a big shiny circle on the front which looks like a button, but has no function as far as I can tell.
Button 1: > Hold down to switch on and play (a small red light comes on to reassure you it's working)
The manual seemed to say you press it once to turn on, then again to play, but this isn't the case
with mine.
> Tap once to pause.
> Hold down to switch off.

Button 2 > tap to go back to beginning of track or to previous song, hold down to turn the volume down.
Button 3 > tap to go forward to next song, hold down to turn the volume up.

Power source: 1 AAA battery. This is entirely personal but I much prefer these. You can find them anywhere in the world and buying rechargeable batteries cuts any cost issues with replacing them. The slightly more expensive model (£12.97 from memory) comes with a rechargeable battery built in, which can be plugged into any USB.
Other stuff: apparently it has a Flash drive and supports DRM encoded tracks for those of you who know about these things! Plays MP3s and WMAs
Also comes with: headphones, 1 x (non rechargeable) battery, tiny instruction manual.

~~Uploading songs~~

Take the little plastic nodule-type lid off to reveal a USB connector. Stick it in your USB port.
If you have Windows 2000 or later it will recognize it, if not you can apparently download the right driver from the Tesco website.
It says in the instruction manual that you can just copy and paste files onto it like a normal storage device. I found I could do this with songs I'd already copied to my hard drive, but not when I just put a CD in. For that I used the 'rip' function on Windows Media Player. I think this is to do with the copyright or the software, rather than this MP3 player as my old one was the same, but thought I would mention it in case anyone was stuck wondering why it didn't work.

~~Music Quality~~

I have to say I'm not fussy about these things so can't give you an in depth analysis. I could hear the songs fine and there was no hissing or background noise.

~~Disadvantages~~

Now I don't mean to be fussy, obviously this is probably the cheapest MP3 player you will ever buy, but I do have a couple of quibbles.

~Locking~
I came to throw my new player in my bag as per usual and realized there is no way of locking it. As I tend to carry mine round with me all day I am used to locking it so that if you accidentally press the buttons it won't switch on. The Technika has no way of doing this so I have to make sure I don't knock the off button while I'm listening to it and then find somewhere safe to put it when I'm not using it. Unfortunately I am not the tidiest person and in fact wherever I considered was a safe place to put it last night has completely escaped me this morning. A good solution to this is to just take the battery out when it is floating around your bag, which is what I will probably do when I find it again.

~Carrying~
A minor point but added to this is the fact that it doesn't have a belt clip. It does have a little loop so you can tie some string round it, but you need to find some way of positioning it so it doesn't bang against you if you're running and turn itself off. Plan B, which I'm going to try later, is to tie it round my waist with some ribbon and then tuck it into the waistband of my tracksuit.

~Head Phones~
This is my major quibble with the poor little Technika. It comes with head phones but they are not the standard size. The port is much smaller than standard so if you are stupid enough to lose or break your headphones (and I am entirely stupid enough) they might not be easy to replace. If I take it to the gym, I have to take a separate pair of head phones to listen to the television there. More importantly it doesn't connect to my in-car cassette adapter so I have no way of listening to it when I'm driving. As this is the place I usually listen to my MP3s it is a big drawback for me. I could get an adapter but, because of the other issues above, I will probably just buy a new MP3 player. Obviously for some people this won't matter so much, but it seems a pointless irritation as I'm sure it wouldn't cost more to put in a standard size port.

I should also mention here that this is obviously an absolutely basic model. It has no display, so you cannot see which song is playing and it doesn't have any other functions such as shuffle, repeat etc,

~~Advantages~~

In case I haven't said it enough: It costs £4.97! The drawbacks are minor and mostly to be expected. If you wanted an all-singing all-dancing does-your-laundry-as-it-plays-a-tune king of a player, you are looking in the wrong place. If you want a small, non-tempting-to-thieves, easy to use MP3 player, with decent sound quality then you will be laughing all the way to the bank with this one.

Use it as a back up to another one, to take on holiday or camping, when you don't want to risk a more expensive one. If nothing else I will use it as something to train to while I hunt around for another cheap MP3 player with a standard headphones port, if I can find it of course...  

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