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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.
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Song Play display is easy to read. |
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Menu with color icons. |
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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
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