MusicGremlin’s Wireless MP3 Player
MUSICGREMLIN’S WIRELESS MP3 PLAYER REVIEW: Why Fi?
February 2007 By Steve "Popeye" Smith
Anyone who has ever synched an iPod, or Zen or Rio, knows the minor inconvenience of living with a tethered music player. Why oh why, many of us pester Apple, can’t we get our digital music players to have the same Wi-Fi connectivity as our laptops? The new Microsoft Zune player provides answer, and Apple is rumored to be working on a Wi-Fi iPod as well. But the MusicGremlin stands alone as a good first stab at a wireless device.
At $299, the 8GB Gremlin seems overpriced compared to the latest iPod, which gives you 30GB of storage for twenty dollars less and in a more stylish package. As a basic player the Gremlin is as unattractive as its name and unremarkable in most other respects. The black brick is smaller than a deck of cards and only 4 oz. Along the rubberized edges you find buttons for changing volume and advancing to the next track. The square four-way directional button on the front navigates through playlists and your library easily.
Unlike the iPod, the Gremlin does have an FM tuner, although I had little luck pulling in anything but the strongest signals. The interface is more detailed and versatile than the iPod’s. A pop-up menu lets you delete highlighted files, assign them to specific playlists, change their position in the play order and even beam them wirelessly to a fellow Gremlin owner. The sound quality is fine, although some form of equalizer with presets would have been welcome.
The real value add for the Gremlin is the direct Wi-Fi connection to its online music store. Once you configure the 802.11b network link to your router or to a hot spot service, the MusicGremlin can browse, buy and download tracks directly from a 2 million track catalog. The big challenge is navigating such a vast collection. You search artists, tracks and genres using a search box. Much like inputting text with a game console controller, the Gremlin has you roll through the alphabet to enter each letter individually. The search engine filters the results beneath the search line as you add another letter, so you zero in on a more manageable list to navigate with your cursor pretty quickly. This works remarkably well. I located our target songs within a minute. The major drawback is that you cannot stream a sample of the track before ordering.
Once you have registered and activated your device with the MusicGremlin site, you can download songs directly to the device wirelessly by paying the customary $.99 per track or $14.99/month for unlimited downloading. I wish MusicGremlin had sprung for a faster and more up-to-date 802.11g Wi-Fi chip, since the “b” connection takes several minutes to download each track. You can buy tracks from your PC as well and either have them ready to transfer to the device wirelessly the next time it logs in or download them to your computer to synch them with the Gremlin via Windows Media Player 10 and a USB cable.
At $299, the 8GB Gremlin seems overpriced compared to the latest iPod, which gives you 30GB of storage for twenty dollars less and in a more stylish package. As a basic player the Gremlin is as unattractive as its name and unremarkable in most other respects. The black brick is smaller than a deck of cards and only 4 oz. Along the rubberized edges you find buttons for changing volume and advancing to the next track. The square four-way directional button on the front navigates through playlists and your library easily.
Unlike the iPod, the Gremlin does have an FM tuner, although I had little luck pulling in anything but the strongest signals. The interface is more detailed and versatile than the iPod’s. A pop-up menu lets you delete highlighted files, assign them to specific playlists, change their position in the play order and even beam them wirelessly to a fellow Gremlin owner. The sound quality is fine, although some form of equalizer with presets would have been welcome.
The real value add for the Gremlin is the direct Wi-Fi connection to its online music store. Once you configure the 802.11b network link to your router or to a hot spot service, the MusicGremlin can browse, buy and download tracks directly from a 2 million track catalog. The big challenge is navigating such a vast collection. You search artists, tracks and genres using a search box. Much like inputting text with a game console controller, the Gremlin has you roll through the alphabet to enter each letter individually. The search engine filters the results beneath the search line as you add another letter, so you zero in on a more manageable list to navigate with your cursor pretty quickly. This works remarkably well. I located our target songs within a minute. The major drawback is that you cannot stream a sample of the track before ordering.
Once you have registered and activated your device with the MusicGremlin site, you can download songs directly to the device wirelessly by paying the customary $.99 per track or $14.99/month for unlimited downloading. I wish MusicGremlin had sprung for a faster and more up-to-date 802.11g Wi-Fi chip, since the “b” connection takes several minutes to download each track. You can buy tracks from your PC as well and either have them ready to transfer to the device wirelessly the next time it logs in or download them to your computer to synch them with the Gremlin via Windows Media Player 10 and a USB cable.
