So I got this mp3 player thing, the kind that does almost everything you can think of, including takes SD cards, has a 3 inch screen and a built-in camcorder. It’s Made In China. Bought off eBay. EBay’s terrible like that, I went on looking for a good quality mp3 player that just plays music and is rechargeable, and I start seeing ones that do more and more, for ridiculously cheap prices. This “JXD 638″ (it has another name, but I can’t read Chinese) was around UKP 55, which somehow became EUR 130 including postage; still, a reasonable bargain.
But it’s the Made In China bit that fascinates me, while also making me think that China’s global economic dominance may be a bit further away than is sometimes predicted. (Strictly speaking, it’s the Designed In China bit. I realise that most Western or Japanese brand names are already manufactured in Chinese factories.) So you have features like a 4-way controller, similar to thousands of other phones/mp3 players/video games/tv remote controls. Except, on this one, up/down isn’t controlled by the up/down keys, but by two other left/right keys marked with volume controls. Well, that’s what they usually do, but when it comes to, say, setting the date, they increase the number. That’s “-” to increase it, or “+” to decrease it.
The part of the pad that you might expect to move things up and down, are labelled MENU and ESC respectively. Only, exiting from most screens doesn’t actually involve the ESCAPE key, it involves bringing up the MENU (in the down position), scrolling down a menu using the RIGHT key-pad, then pressing PLAY.
There’s also no centre “okay” button in the 4-way pad. That function is mostly done by the tiny PLAY button off to the top-left.
Despite being listed in English on ebay.co.uk, there’s no English language manual. This isn’t a major setback, as the quality of translation in China is generally so garbled as to be useless anyway. With my background in localisation, I can’t help feeling this is revenge for all those American companies who request written translation into Mandarin (a spoken dialect),and then use machine conversion to create what they call a “Cantonese” version. Still, it’s a shame that the advertised Chinese-English dictionary function doesn’t exist. Perhaps they got stuck on the bit that puzzled me, which is how one would look up words on a device that doesn’t have a keyboard of any kind.
On the other hand, an unexpected bonus is the Notepad. Again, since there’s no keyboard, there’s no way to actually enter any notes. Still, you can read text documents previously transferred from a computer. An interesting little localisation bug which might not occur to those unfamiliar with the English language, is that readers generally expect line breaks to occur in between words, as opposed to in the middle. Again, revenge on all those documents translated into Thai that break words in confusing places.
One feature that you’re not likely to see on a Western-designed gadget is the games console. Of course, given how much Sony and Nintendo have to struggle each time they launch a new console, no one would bother to design games for a small, obscure manufacturer. JXD have cleverly got around this by producing an NES simulator, and kindly included 1,155 free games on a CD. Copyright? Sorry, there’s a problem with my dictionary. I’m not complaining though, I’ll be replaying all those childhood games like Boulderdash, Mario and, er, “Hyaku no Sekai no Monogatari - The Tales on a Watery Wil “. Pity about the up/down keys…
Then there’s the calendar. I haven’t quite figured this one out yet - although there are dropdowns to select the month and year, there’s no way of accessing those dropdowns, so I’m pretty much stuck in April. It’s a pity, cos there’s also some mysterious Chinese text that changes with the date, aas well as a Hello-Kitty style dog. I’m rather hoping it’s a horoscope function.
So does it actually play mp3s? Well, yes… sort of. Like everything made-in-China, there’s a catch. In this case, it’s unable to play music in folders. So if I want to put, say, 30 albums on it, I can, as long as I put them all in the music folder. Which means I’ll have a long long way to scroll if I decide to listen to Yo La Tengo.
Edit: I found the dictionary function. Apparently, the way it works is, you start with A and scroll down (using the RIGHT key) to the word you want. I don’t know how many words it contains - so far, I’ve got as far as “Abbatial”, which apparently means “having to do with an abbey, abbot, or abbess”, a concept I see cropping up all the time for Chinese speakers. There’s also a few extras that would only be found in a dictionary produced in a country that doesn’t use spaces in its own language… words like “aboveground”. Now, let’s see if it’s got “zygote”…
