Photo gallery: mobiBLU Cube2A day is a long time in the world of portable audio. Less than 24 hours after we received the mobiBLU Cube2 press release, which boasted it was the "world's smallest MP3 player", Apple's Steve Jobs unveiled the second-generation iPod Shuffle, which has even tinier dimensions, and looks hotter to boot. Ouch.
So the Cube2's "world's smallest" gimmick has been cruelly snatched away (the Shuffle is wider and taller, but flat, and therefore wins in terms of volume -- we calculated!); that shouldn't matter as long as it has plenty of features, a solid design, and an intuitive interface, right? Right? Oh dear.
Design
The world's second-smallest MP3 player is, befitting its name, cube-shaped, with each side measuring
25.4mm. A tiny 65k-colour OLED display graces one side, with the right adjoining side featuring circular
buttons for track navigation and volume adjustment, and the left adjoining side housing the lock and menu
buttons. The top side has a headphone port, which, unusually, also serves as a socket for USB
connection.
The Cube2 dangles from a set of lanyard-style headphones, which would be fine if said headphones looked good and sat well. However, the design is both impractical and unattractive, with two big silver beads and dual plastic toggles making for an unnecessarily cluttered look. The lanyard style also means that the player can't be placed in a pants pocket unless you use another set of headphones -- you're stuck wearing the Cube2 around your neck like a gaudy trinket. Not good news if you want an MP3 player you can exercise with; the constant bouncing of the cube's edges against your sternum would be a major irritation. We'd ditch the daggy lanyard contraption in favour of basic earbuds.
Features
A feature that surprised and perplexed us was the ability to view images and video files on the miniscule
display. If you thought it was impractical to watch a blockbuster movie on an iPod, you will surely find
the notion of squinting at videos on a 13 x 13mm screen pretty ridiculous.
If miniaturised multimedia appeals to you and you're keen on transferring pics and videos to the player, you will need to convert the files to MSJ (for images) or MSV (for video) format. The included software offers a basic, intuitive interface for doing this, and the compressed files are easily dragged to the player, which appears as an external drive on your PC.
Other features include a surprisingly clear FM radio, voice and radio recording and the ability to alter playback speed of files.
Performance
Much of the frustration we felt when using the Cube2 could be traced to one source -- the size of the
display. Due to the lack of OLED real estate, menu titles and file names cannot be displayed in full statically, but scroll across the screen when highlighted. While you can adjust the scrolling speed, menu navigation is still a necessarily slow experience, and the tiny buttons don't help matters. You may need to grow your fingernails in order to browse your music collection on the Cube2.
The fact that the buttons perform multiple functions according to how long they are pressed for was also problematic. This was particularly apparent when we went to make a voice recording and discovered that the Record button is also the Hold key. We ended up with a recording of buttons being pushed repeatedly and several swear words being uttered.
For what is essentially a novelty music player, the sound quality of the Cube2 was quite good. Songs did become a little muffled at higher volumes, but things improved when we tweaked the sliders on the custom equaliser.
Battery life was acceptable at around 8 hours, and adjusting the LCD brightness and backlight timer makes the juice last a little longer.
Having lost its biggest selling point in the wake of the much more publicised 2G Shuffle, the Cube2 struggles to be appealing. It's a cute, diverting little tech toy you can clip on a keychain and impress people with, but its many extras just don't perform that well. And we still don't believe that there's anyone out there with a desperate need to watch video content on a fingernail-sized screen.
