My new gizmo

The most hi-tech gadget I have probably is my laptop and my mp3 player……… until last night. I have been always been an admirer of new technology, but sometimes couldn't just afford it. When I saw my friend's iPhone… I was thrilled and in awe of its features. Ok, there are some flaws here and there, but we have to admit, the iPhone is one heck of a great gadget to have. The touch screen, the flexibility, the sound, the resolution, well except the price, I do wish that they would have a cheaper version. Which led me to some really surprising discovery.

Many Chinese companies are banking on the touch-screen technology….. a couple of them, probably the major ones in the game, have come up with iPhone clones, albeit not as a phone but as an MP4/3 player, with camera. But I won't be writing about that until I get hold of one. Last night as I was visiting my friend, Shoaib's store in Corniche Commercial Center in the heart of Jeddah's Balad district, he showed me some very interesting stuff. And I just fell in love with a cute little MP4 player, well not really little, its got 2"+ screen. The cool thing is that it uses the touchscreen technology, although not on viewing screen, but on the control panel. Instead of buttons to press, you can simply pass your finger to forward, rewind, scroll up or down, select menu, increase the volume, select the pre-set equalizer etc. For a cheap price, it’s a worthy catch.

I couldn't sleep tinkering with it. Takes a little time though to get used to it. One very bad setback is the poor English used in the manual. It will take you some time to realize the manufacturer could have used a translation software bought in their local market to do the job instead of hiring a human translator… the grammar and sentence composition sometimes doesn’t just make sense. But then again, anybody into technology and these kind of stuff can, in no time, figure it out.

The resolution is also good, albeit the built-in speaker is like listening to a cockroach-choir… so its better just to use the headphone which came with the package. You can easily re-charge the unit either through direct AC or via USB to your computer. I like the image of the battery while charging, as it is displayed on the screen.

I got the 1GB, but can't wait until I can take a bigger capacity like 2 or 4GB…. So I can download all my favorite Youtube clips…and speaking of Youtube… well.. I got to talk about that in another posting.