AboutUI

MP3 TCO

For the first time in my life, I’ve bought an MP3 player. I’ve had some before which were crappy giveaways which I’ve gotten as some promotional thingies, but my (slowly) growing hobby on two wheels demanded that I get me a new thing. The requirements were simple:

1. Small
2. Have a clip
3. Nice design.

Naturally, I started with the iPods. They have superb design, small, clip, whatnot. Sure, they are expensive in Israel (as are all Apple products) but hey – I deserve it. However – here came the iTunes thingie. Installing an 80Mb bloatware on each computer I have/manage (4, the last time I counted) was unacceptable to me. So i decided to go with the really cool looking Sansa Clip:

Its small, I can just open it as a shared drive and drag and drop stuff to it, it looks cool and with 4Gb It can make both the Lufthansa flights more bearable and riding the bike real fun.

However, there is this tiny tiny problem. A lot of my MP3z have hebrew titles to them. My Brand new Sansa clip displays them from left to right, instead of right to left.

I know, This is a little thing, but it annoyed me. So I started searching for a solution to the problem. I quickly learned from Google that I need to install a firmware updater. No problem. Download, Install and then:

Which is of course completely not true. Sitting inside the sunny Walldorf offices of SAP, I’m naturally behind a firewall + proxy. The Updater is not smart enough to re-use the internet connection settings of one of my browsers (I have IE8, FF3 and Chrome all running) to connect and assumes a supr dumb connection setting.

In enterprise software terms, Sansa failed on providing BIDI support (Bi-Directional) and their software developers should really be sent to one of these 10 jobs.

However – they have such a cool looking MP3, so who cares? Which is actually the realization I have from this – Yes, TCO/TCA is important. But Bling Sells…