consumer advice

Since my Valentine's Day post, the Q-be has decided, quite literally, that it's NOT PLAYING. I selected 1G of songs and spent ages transferring them onto it from our iTunes on the mac. Once it was done, I disconnected it and pressed play... and the display on the front of the cube read "Not Play", and froze like that until the batteries died. Not yet beaten, I reconnected it to the PC, formatted it and tried again. Same.

So, lovely as my tiny cuboid MP3 player looks, it was pretty useless as it made not a sound. I'd even bought some headphones which partly resolved the genetic problem of having stupid shaped ears. But no, the qbe wasn't playing.

Last night, obviously feeling optimistic, I tried uploading some tracks onto it from the PC rather than the mac. It works. Since then, I've filled it with nearly 1G full of stuff and it still works.

So, ladies and gentlemen, be warned. The Q-Be packaging clearly states that it is compatible with PC and mac. It's not true. Your mac will recognise your Q-be and, however slowly, will fill it with files of your choice. But once this is completed, your Q-be will refuse to play any of them.

It hurts to say it - I'm a mac lover (not as extreme as some, but the alliance is there) and would normally advocate the use of them over PCs wherever possible. I only have a PC laptop because most schools aren't mac compatible. But this time, mac has let me down. I know the issue really was that the Q-be couldn't play the mac files but I can't help thinking it has a little to do with the fact that the boys at Apple would very much like us all to buy an iPod on which to play our tunes and are not so keen on the idea of other players handling the tracks.

And yes, the iPod looks cool. But really... really really... could anything look as good as my cube?

Obviously I've told Dan that I want another 59 1G Q-bes to contend with his 60G iPod... I'll have them all strung around my neck. Yeah. Right.