Right before leaving China, I figured I’d go buy a couple of electronic items in Hua Qiang Bei, one of them being a new mp3 player. Since my iPod myseriously vanished from the back pouch of my backpack within a 15 minute period around Da Ju Yuan, I’d been using my cell phone as an mp3 player. Well, it lacked in many areas, so I figured I’d invest in a cheap Chinese one. What would it hurt to look?

Well, I checked a couple out, was most impressed by one by “Meizu”. It obviously borrowed heavily from the iPod. The graphics looked nicer, a little more crisp and some nice intensity fades add pizzaz. Instead of a wheel though, there’s a touchpad running up and down. Slide your finger up to turn the volume up, down to turn it down, etc.

The thing is riddled with bugs though. Some of them were totally tolerable, like menus ending up nowhere, some settings randomly resetting. Some were annoying, like tracks skipping and repeating at the very end a few times before moving to the next file. But, then the worst kicked in about a week later: the player could not shut down! I’d always get a “Auto Shutting Down…” message after the device was inactive for 5 minutes or so, but it would just hang the player. The only thing you could do was reset the device. Basically, it was impossible to turn off!

(above) Not a bad looking player, eh?   Can you see the “shutting down” message?

A couple of weeks later, I bought another iPod – what a relief! For many things, you can beat the rule of “you get what you pay for” in China, but not this time.