GeIL DAVID iBall MPV Wearable MP3 Player Review

Overview
I cannot help it to first point out that the company name "Geil" has some fun meanings in German: cool, horny, lewd, lustful, phat, prurient, randy, ruttish, voluptuous and wicked. Geil was a totally overused word in the 80s, used so often that people got really sick of it. Now its coming back again. A German electronics retailer is advertising with the slogan "Geiz ist Geil" - which means as much as Stinginess is Cool. For more on the word geil see Wikipedia (German).

Now that I have that behind me lets focus on the iBall wearable MP3 Player. The GeIL mp3 player comes in a cool box with magnetic closing mechanism - nice touch. I got the black version (comes also in silver) of the disc shaped player. It measures 55mm in diameter and is 10mm thick. The weight is 33g. USB 1.1 and a low battery play-time of 4 hours are the negatives in the specs. The iBall features a 1" OLED display with 65k colors. Besides playing MP3 and WMA files it also supports MPV video files. A FM Tuner is also available.

The design is not really exciting. the player is well and solid made, but by far not as cool looking as the Eratech EMP-ZII  I reviewed last year. The button interface is straight forward to use, although not entirely intuitive at first. The bundled necklace head-set is very cool. I had other necklace head-sets but they had a fabric chord in addition to the cables. This one uses coated cables as the necklace strap. The length is adjustable with a little ball on the necklace.
 

The sound quality is good, nothing to complain here. I did not play with the video feature as I did not see the point watching any video on a 1" screen. If the GeIL iBall would have a TV-Tuner, then yes of course - see the NHJ Wrist Watch Review. The iBall also can display text and photos, I am also not convinced that those features make sense ina  small player like that.

Conclusion
The GeIL iBall MPV has tons of features in a small solid built MP3 player. The headset necklace upgrades the unit quite a bit and makes it nice to wear. The color screen is good. Text, video and photo viewing are less useful in my opinion on a 1" screen. The overall design is a bit bland.

 
How to Buy
The GeIL iBall starts at $109 (256MB) and sells at the GeIL store or via Amazon.com.
Find more MP3 Players in our MP3 Player Shopping Guide.

Specification
Comes in 256MB, 512MB and 1GB configurations
Decode the video files MPV
SP/LP digital recording function
OLED multicolor and picture icon display
USB 1.1 Flash Disk function, support USB mass storage
Digital FM radio
E-Book / TXT reading
Multi-Language support with proper FONT files installed
3D Stereo Sound Effect