Digital Trends

Music Gremlin MG-1000 June 20th, 2006 | by Rebecca Day

Performance

The killer app for the Gremlin music player is also its Achilles' heel. Wireless is flaky. I put the two players side by side and one could get a network signal from my home router and the other couldn't. I'd try to download a song and lose a signal. I'd try again 5 seconds later and everything worked fine. I never did find a free network I could tap into in various locations in New York City, near the San Francisco convention center or in suburban New York.

When I did a network search in an apartment building in New York City, no networks showed up on the list of available networks, despite the location of a Starbucks 2/10 mile away and many apartments with Wi-Fi. In San Francisco, the player found my hotel's Wi-Fi network but wasn't able to tap in. The MusicGremlin can't penetrate a splash page since those pages require a browser for entry.

I was able to beam songs from one device to the other sitting about 2 feet from my router, and that was fun. I went to the community mode and saw that a user I didn't know was listening to the Indigo Girls. I tapped into her library and grabbed a few tunes. I can see how this product could really take off as the wireless part of the equation becomes more robust. It's not there yet.

The FM radio was useless to me from my office about 30 miles from midtown Manhattan. My Tivoli PAL radio, by contrast, pulls in my favorite radios without a hitch.

The Gremlin's sound quality was as good as any other MP3 player I've used, and volume goes up farther than I would ever set it. As a music player, I found it to be a worthy competitor to my iPod—simple to use with good sound quality. Each track download took about 30 seconds, which could add up if you've selected a bunch. You can either add songs from the device itself or from the website using a PC. If you select the latter, it will only download when you reconnect Gremlin to Wi-Fi, although Khedouri says you'll be able to download via USB in the future.

Battery life is an issue because wireless gobbles up a lot of juice. You have to remember to turn off the Wi-Fi to conserve power. You generally can't download songs or software updates with less than half a tank on the fuel gauge. The good news is, if a song doesn't load fully, the player will pick up later where it left off. On a full charge, I made it from San Francisco to Newark with half a battery to spare. Khedouri says the company expects the battery to last the lifetime of the device, which in the tech world is probably 2-3 years before a user wants to upgrade. There's no battery replacement plan in place.