The Play Button is either a desperate attempt to incorporate all the annoyances of analog music into a digital package, or it is a genius marketing move which will perhaps usurp the USB thumb-drive as the ultimate in corporate schwag giveaways.
It’s an MP3 player, and it’s built into a button. The front of the button (or badge, as it is called in Great Britain) can be customized to show an image of the latest cool-haired band of the moment, and the body has a single jack socket used for both headphones and for charging the battery within.
And then things turn bad. The controls are set into the back panel, making them hard to get to, definitely a case of function following form. Worse, there is no way to change the music, or the order it is played in. Mercifully, you can skip backwards and forwards, but in every way you are treated as if you are listening to an old LP or CD.
It’s tricky to say if an iPod has a larger environmental footprint than CDs and vinyl. On the one hand, iPods get tossed out every few years while record collections are kept. On the other hand, the packaging for a CD alone uses more plastic than that of a few a Nanos. The Play Button combines the worst of all of these.
The device is aimed at bulk orders, so you’ll have to wait until you local bank loads one with Christmas songs as a festive “fun” giveaway before you can open one up and hack it. Until then, why don’t you join me and cry a little inside at this willful technological step backwards?
Play Button product page [Play Button]
See Also:
- World's First MP3 Player Still Works (Here's What It Played …
- $15 MP3 Player Mimics, Outperforms Vertu Phone
- Chunky Square MP3-Player Is a Cuboid to Avoid
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