It just feels wrong to criticize, when someone does something nice. In this case, the folks at Best Buy sent along a little REDI mp3 player for my Aged Mother to take with her when she went into the hospital, back at the end of June.
Great idea, eh?
Well, it was… sort of…
My mother (yes, same one; I’ve just got the one) always said, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” — and, fortunately, I do have some nice things to say about the player. But it’s not all good, so I’ve been really stalling here, not much wanting to write about it…
Okay, here goes:
Basically, it’s a $40 1GB mp3 player, pre-loaded with music so you can start using it right away — or as soon as you get another battery to replace the highly questionable one that comes in the package. When you do want to change the selection, it comes with the USB cable to glom right on to your computer and go to it. And the screen isn’t too hard to read, as these tiny LED screens go. Oh, and there’s an FM tuner, too — essential for we who are avid fans of public radio.
And I’m sure, as a $40 mp3 player goes, it’s about as good as one can expect to get. In fact, the sound is surprisingly clear and true.
The problem is in getting the damn (sorry, Mum!) thing to work.
I’m not even talking about the little wheel-thingie button that sometimes you have to push down on and sometimes you have to turn, or the fact that if you bite your fingernails you’re going to have a hard time pushing some of the other dainty little buttons — my brother gave up in no time.
No, the big stumbling block is those incomprehensible instructions! You’d think that a nice diagram, showing all the bits and buttons, all nicely labelled, would be helpful — no? Well, no. Because the nicely labelled bits and buttons had completely different names in the (translated from an Asian language?) instruction text.
Counting the helpful night-shift nurse on her coffee break, at one point there were 6 of us, with an age range of 16 to 79 years old and a total of 7 university degrees, trying to figure out how Mum could distract herself with a bit of CBC radio on that sleepless night before surgery. Music, yes, got that, no problem — and she liked the music selection just fine. (“Be sure to say that,” she told me: “I like the music.”) But to switch from music to tuner, following the instructions provided? Eh. We gave up, and I brought my own mp3 player in the next day. For the rest of her hospital stay, she kept my Kix tuned to the radio station, and her REDI all ready for music.
Maybe one of these days we’ll take some time and sit down and figure the thing out. It can’t really be that confusing, can it? I guess the big disappointment here was a result of the way the player is marketed. The idea is that the music’s pre-loaded so Dad and Grannie don’t have to wade into the big scary world of iTunes until they’re good and ready, right? So we all had expected much greater ease of use — both in a physical sense, what with the tiny buttons and strange wheelie-thing and all — and as a result of the poor instructions.
But hey, it was nice of you guys to send it, anyway — and Mum told me to be sure to say “Thank you”; she appreciated the thought.