STEPHEN FRY

I was mean to the Philips Streamium Player the other week. Some of you might have thought, “Well, that was a PC product and Fry is a Mac man to his boots, so what can we expect?” I can hardly express therefore the pleasure with which I am able to rave about another, in many ways, similar device, and one that is even more emphatically PC-oriented.

Trevor Baylis leapt to fame 10 years ago with his wind-up radio. Now comes his Eco Media Player (around £170). There is something about this adorable device that makes me smile, and keep smiling. The difference between it and the Streamium says a lot about the crucial emotional reciprocity between manufacturer and consumer of which one is aware the moment one opens the packaging. One product gives off an air of corporate indifference and separation from the human world, the other a sense of wanting to please, of wanting to love and be loved.

Chunky, rubber-skinned and round-cornered, the Eco Player’s dimensions make it thicker than the mainstream generation of players, but then it has to house the famous Baylis crank. For all that, it feels lighter than a packet of cigarettes. My version has 2GB of internal flash memory, but models up to 8GB are (or will be) available. All that you’d hope to find is present and correct: mini USB connector with which it can be charged via your PC or Mac’s USB (2.0) port, slot for a mini-SD memory card and sockets for headphones and line-in. Plus FM radio (great quality), a music player in all the usual formats (if you like volume, this blasts the iPod out of the water), video (using the asv codec: boo), a voice recorder, a self-styled ebook reader and a startlingly bright torch. Yes, torch.

  READ ALL

Gazing into the techno-future can be fun. We all dream of utopias involving benign robots, food for all and fusion power that is free, safe and unlimited, but then there are the cacotopias too – nightmare visions of malevolent machines that turn on mankind. It has been usual to suppose that the two-pronged threat to our liberty and our privacy would emanate from big business and government, from untrammelled corporate and bureaucratic greed, stupidity and wickedness. But let me paint another scenario…

I expect all of you have heard of the risks posed by the various forms of attack code that go under names like virus, Trojan horse, worm, malware and so on. These are little bits of clandestine code that your computer picks up, usually through email attachments, designed to infect the host (your PC), raid its address books, send out copies of themselves to all your friends and contacts and then either spitefully screw with your operating system, rendering it inoperative or, more likely these days, record your keyboard input and send back to the malicious code’s originator a log of such keystrokes which can be used to determine your passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive data.

  READ ALL

And lo! The great day came.

I have been using an Apple iPhone now for more than four months. This is due to an unhealthy mixture of friendship with its designer, a slobbery and pathetic love of the new, the possession of an American billing address (necessary until today for the activation and use of the device) and a willingness to pay preposterous international roaming charges. It puts me in a good position however, to tell you what you’re in for if you decide to own one of these honeys.

I should first get out of the way all the matters that will please those of you wrinkling your noses in a contemptuous Ian Hisloppy sort of way at the sheer hype, pretension, nonsense and hoopla attendant on what is, after all, only a phone. There is much to support your case.

  READ ALL

Philips were behind the tape cassette and the CD, but their new music player is a woeful attempt to take on the iPod – perhaps it’s time they looked for a rapid injection of talent.

Apple’s ability to grab headlines is a matter of huge annoyance to many. How come their launch of a phone makes the evening news? A new iPod, and it’s a bigger headline than Darfur. Whoopy-doo, as Americans like to say. Why should I care?

I have an iPhone, an iPod Touch and a new Nano to hand, but to save the anti-Apples out there aggravation, I shan’t review them. They don’t need it. All you have to do is ask someone who has one if you can play with it for a second and any pointless carpings melt into nothing.

And if they don’t, well, that’s fine, too. You can carry on hating Apple and thinking it’s all hype, but you’ll have to accept that the iPhone and iPod Touch changed the face of hand-held digital devices.

In 1984, many said Apple’s use of a mouse and pull-down menus was a silly, stylistic nonsense, but sure enough in the end everyone had to follow. Apple doesn’t always invent or originate all the technology for which it becomes known, but it is nearly always first to bring it fully formed to market.

Proof of how it has changed the digital world, and a clear demonstration of how far its rivals have to go to compete, comes in the shape of the Philips Streamium Player. (Yes, someone was paid to devise that name.)

“Its bright, large display and intuitive UI with Sensory Touchpad SuperScroll let you easily engage with all your music, videos and photos.”

Actually, Streamium is the name for a range of Philips devices that are meant to utilise WiFi home networks and Universal Plug and Play devices to “deliver content”, streamed via wireless, which gives some justification to the preposterous name.

The family of products are multiplatform and allow you to watch movies, listen to music, download podcasts, vodcasts and so on all over the house. Dozens of companies are trying to offer the same thing, but Philips is Philips, so we should pay attention. They were behind the tape cassette and CD, after all. They’re big. They know what they’re about.

Well, no, they don’t. They’re wading backwards in treacle with this. A Flash device (meaning its ROM memory is solid state not disk drive) of 4GB, this product is an insult to the buyer and a stain on the reputation of a once noble company.

Despite the vaunted multiplatform interoperability of the Streamium name, this is a PC-only player. I don’t mind products such as this per se, but what would Mac users who have the Philips Media Manager software and other devices feel about the name Streamium being appropriated for an object that a) doesn’t stream and b) is incompatible with their OS?

But that’s of no importance compared with the cheap, clumsy and dreadful nature of the device itself. I wanted to throw it in the ocean after five minutes (I am in America right now), but instead gave it to a friend who threw it away after 10. One knows the instant one plays the bundled video content, a truly pathetic and dated home movie of some dudes skiing, that we are dealing with a dog. The blocky, pixelated images are so poor as to beggar belief (220 x 176 pixels) – and this is the footage that’s meant to show it off!

It gets worse. It has touch controls, but not touch screen. In the desire to jump on Apple’s multitouch bandwagon, Philips have come up with something worse than an old-fashioned knob. The Streamium offers fiddly controls with terrible delay, so you’re always pressing them too often and reversing their function. The sound level is poor and the phones inadequate. The whole thing’s a gift to Apple.

The price, too, is a disaster – you can get an 8Gb iPod Nano with its stunning 320 x 240 resolution screen for the same money. How mad, sad, ignorant and deranged would a consumer have to be to forgo the latter for Philips’s horror? Believe me, this will be a forgotten failure within a year. I don’t know who is in charge of recruitment or marketing at Philips, but they need a rapid injection of talent, imagination, flair and understanding, or in this sector at least they’ll rapidly go under.