Form over function:
Music Player Adds a Lens and a Riddle [NYT]
By DAVID POGUE
OLYMPUS must think its latest electronic gadget is going to be big, really big. The company gave it a cryptic, hyper-hip name (m:robe). It gave the product its own Web site (olympusgroove.com), something it doesn't ordinarily do for an individual product. And most startling of all, the company spent $4.8 million to show two m:robe TV ads during the Super Bowl.
What pocket gizmo could possibly justify all of that fuss?
The m:robe 500i is a hard-drive-based music player like the Apple iPod. The twist is that it's also a digital camera. It has an enormous 3.7-inch screen for showing off your photos. (Olympus also sells a smaller model called the m:robe 100, which plays music only; no digital camera or color screen.)
By far the 500i's most winning feature is its gorgeous, darkly modern design. Olympus seems to be the first company to get it through its head that the iPod owes a huge part of its success to its elegant, sleek looks.
In fact, the m:robe looks a little like a flipped-over iPod. Its back panel is shiny white plastic like the iPod's front; its front panel features shiny metal like the iPod's chrome back - and it's just as easily marred by fingerprints.
There's only a single physical button on the entire 500i: the on-off switch. (It doubles as a hold button.) You're supposed to operate all other functions by tapping your finger on the color touch screen. This approach has important benefits; for example, buttons can appear and disappear according to the context. But it also has some severe drawbacks, like balkiness - you often have to tap three or four times before the sluggish m:robe responds - and about a million more fingerprints.
The software is designy, too, featuring bold white buttons that seem to cast a radiant glow against the deep blue background. Tiny electronic chirps play each time you tap an on-screen button. (Remember the sound on "Star Trek" when William Shatner taps his communicator badge and says, "Kirk out"? That's the one.)
Olympus seems to be aiming the m:robe series at young, hip urban kids with spiky gelled hair. As a result, there's an awful lot of wannabe hipness to the m:robe's design, right down to the terminology; the company calls the m:robe's jerky slide-show transitions a "photo remix" and a saved slide show with music a "cube."
The trouble is, it's easy to cross the line from crypto-hip into utter incoherence. In its pursuit of coolness, Olympus lost sight of several more important product characteristics - like value, usability and features.
On the value front, the m:robe doesn't score well. It costs $450 online, which buys you only a 20-gigabyte hard drive. For that price, you can get an Archos AV420, which lacks a camera but has a 20-gig hard drive, color screen, microphone, memory-card slot, video recording and playback. If you had to break down the m:robe's price, you'd probably find that $350 of it pays for the electronics, $50 is for the cool quotient and the rest goes to the Super Bowl ads.
For almost half a grand, you also might expect that the m:robe might at least match its less expensive rivals in music-player features, but no. You can't create new playlists on the m:robe, can't drag music or photos onto it from the Windows desktop and can't recharge the battery from a computer's U.S.B. connector.
That's too bad, considering the battery lasts only about an hour and a half if you're working with photos. You get Olympus's advertised eight hours of battery life only if you do nothing but play music with the screen off.
There are a few nice features, like a calendar display for calling up photos by date, a screen that shows your songs' lyrics (if you've pasted them in) and a wired remote control whose tiny screen shows the battery charge and playback settings but not, alas, the song name.
Unfortunately, these grace notes are overwhelmed by greater design problems, like how you're supposed to carry this thing around (it's 4.4 by 3 by 0.8 inches, much bigger than an iPod). There's no belt clip or armband. In fact, all you get with the player is what might possibly be the world's least practical carrying case for a music player: a drawstring bag.
The m:robe has a ways to go on the software-usability front, too. You'll be hard pressed to operate it without having to suffer through the awful prose of the user guide, whose every page seems to sing out, "Nyaah, nyaah, you can't understand me!"
Important on-screen anchor buttons like the Home icon jump around from corner to corner as you work. Sometimes text on the screen is tappable and sometimes not; there's no graphic distinction to help you figure out which is which.
Worse, all that glass accommodates only four song titles per screenful. There's no scroll wheel, of course, so you have to move through a big music collection using a microscopic on-screen scroll bar, which is about as much fun as eating sand.
That's if you can get your music onto the player to begin with. The m:robe doesn't work at all on the Macintosh. It accepts only MP3 files and WMA files (of the sort that you buy from online stores, not including Apple's iTunes store). And even if you have Windows, you can't use any of the popular jukebox programs like MusicMatch, iTunes or even Windows Media Player to load up the m:robe. You have to use Olympus's own m:trip software, which is great-looking but slow and, frankly, redundant.
Finally, there's the m:robe's built-in digital camera, which must have begun life as a practical joke. It's a 1.2-megapixel model, for starters, which is only enough resolution for printouts the size of your thumbnail. There's no zoom at all, not even a fake one done in software. And there's no flash, only a white "photo light" that's utterly ineffectual.
As you move the camera, images jerk and blur on the screen; eventually, you realize that this camera is incapable of taking pictures of anything that's not standing stock-still. Any subject or camera motion results in a grainy blur. Too bad there's no shutter button; you have to take the picture by tapping the screen itself, which of course winds up shaking the camera. (You can see sample photos at nytimes.com/circuits.)
Now, it's bad enough that Olympus, a company known for outstanding camera technology, should foist this piece of cameraphone-quality junk on customers who've just spent $450. But it gets worse: in its Super Bowl commercial, millions of viewers saw an urban, hip teenager snapping away at various break-dancing friends, and then displaying freeze-frame close-ups of the resulting brilliant, crystal-clear pictures on the m:robe's screen.
In truth, not one of those pictures could have been taken with this camera.
An Olympus marketing representative was a bit sheepish about the whole thing. "If you're looking at it purely as a camera because it's Olympus, you'll be a little disappointed," he said. "It's a first-generation product that leaves some potential for the next-generation product." He stressed that the m:robe is really designed for music playback and playback of photos you've taken with other digital cameras (and loaded onto the device with your PC). And he said that four new m:robe models will arrive later this year.
Well, here's to future generations, then. There's no reason that the m:robe couldn't have succeeded if its body were smaller, its processor were faster, its price were lower, its cables and software weren't proprietary and its creators weren't so blinded by their pursuit of hip-hop hype.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering about the name: Olympus says that the M stands for music, and "robe" is a reference to ceremonial garments worn by the Japanese to life events like graduations and weddings. But if the m:robe 500i is any indication, you might have to conclude that name is actually an acronym. It stands for Machine: Right Objective, Botched Execution.
tech2.nytimes.com |
