The Honeymoon Is Over

Okay, I’ve had it. I’ve been able to tolerate the little flaws, the imperfections that you learn to work around or live with, but this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Once you’ve reached a certain point of frustration, there’s just no hope of salvaging what you had.

This PocketPC sucks as an MP3 player.

Oh it worked ‘reasonably’ well for a while. It did its job, playing songs in random order, so what could there possibly be to complain about? Aside from the low capacity, that is. And that trying to add whole directories to the playlist would often crash the player, requiring that the files be added one-by-one instead. And the stutter at the start of many songs if I dared try the power-saving mode in order to get a decent lifetime. And that in order to protect the screen I have to keep it in its case, making using the controls difficult. And a half-dozen other little quirks that pop up from time to time.

And then today, after docking it at the office like I’ve done a hundred times before, *something* got corrupted. Now it’ll only play one song and stop. Re-examining the playlist puts garbage in it. Launching it through an association in the File Explorer causes a memory fault. And I just don’t care anymore.

Today’s lesson:

Nailing your head to the coffee table is more fun than fiddling with glitchy PocketPC software.

5 thoughts on “The Honeymoon Is Over”

  1. The iPod is tempting, but it’s a bit more complex than that. That’ll be a whole article by itself, though…

  2. So post the article. :-)

    I’m genuinely curious as to what your specific requirements are (price notwithstanding; we know it’s champagne). :-)

  3. Hey, I have to finish my research first. :-P

    I still have to weigh the relative importance of all the factors like presence of an FM tuner, capacity, direct file access, DRM, size, formats supported, and of course, price.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *