Gearhead: OneDotZeroItis syndrome

In "Backspin" some weeks ago Creative's Nomad Jukebox was mentioned. Gibbs, our alter ego, soundly lambasted Creative for deficiencies in customer service and for sending him a faulty product.

Creative got it together quickly, and a new Jukebox turned up and worked.

Just to recap, the Nomad Jukebox is a device about the size of a regular CD player except that it houses a 6.4G-byte disk drive. This gives you around 100 hours of completely portable MP3-encoded music with surround-sound replay and recording capability.

The Jukebox is a cool idea but we also have some other problems over and above the concerns that Gibbs had. The battery life is miserable. You'll get only about four hours of play time, that is as long as you don't use anything but the basic music selection and play features.

If you should be so wild as to enter the EAX functions that let you select surround sound, change equalization and listen to music in an emulation of a concert hall or a bathroom, then the extra processor load will drain your batteries even faster.

To sort of make up for this, Creative ships two sets of batteries with the device. Unfortunately, when it's time to change them you wind up fiddling not with a battery pack but with a handful of batteries. This will be a clumsy and irritating issue for the road warrior who fumbles the batteries in the confines of Seat 23F and winds up playing chase the batteries down the aisle in coach.

In use, the user interface of the Jukebox is nothing brilliant - it does the job but is less than elegant and lacks fast forward and fast backward.

One major irritation is that the Jukebox pauses briefly between music files. This is not an issue when each track from a CD is stand-alone, but we noticed this problem when listening to LTJ Bukem's "Progression Sessions Volume 4" - a terrific drum and bass collection in a continuous mix.

Using the bundled PC software called the Jukebox PlayCenter, we had ripped the Bukem tracks from the CD. We then downloaded them to the Jukebox, created a playlist to order the tracks correctly, and discovered a hiccup between each track instead of a seamless transition.

The Jukebox is a cool idea but suffers from ReleaseOneDotZeroItis. At the current price of between $452 and $500, the Jukebox seems expensive and likely to be overshadowed by competing products very quickly.

The Jukebox appears to be another case of a product being rushed out with design compromises so to be first to market (in portable high-capacity MP3 players, a device called the HanGo Personal Jukebox was first, but it too suffers from ReleaseOneDotZeroitis and has a high price tag).

With disappointment and with a lighter pocket, we give the Nomad Jukebox a Gearhead rating of six Gear Teeth out of 10.

Sound off at gearhead@gibbs.com.