The BBC convinced 13 year old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman and use it for a week. The first shock came just from seeing the thing:
[My Dad] had told me it was big, but I hadn¡¯t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.
"As I boarded the school bus, where I live in Aberdeenshire, I was greeted with laughter. One boy said: "No-one uses them any more." Another said: "Groovy." Yet another one quipped: "That would be hard to lose."
My friends couldn't imagine their parents using this monstrous box, but there was interest in what the thing was and how it worked. " It gets worse from there. Wearing the 30 year old device on his belt (¡°it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets¡±) Scott felt embarrassed at the attentions of passersby as they stared and shouted insults.
Other problems included lack of a shuffle mode (¡°I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down ¡°rewind¡± and releasing it randomly¡±), terrible battery life (three hours), sound quality (we¡¯d disagree ¡ª even a tape sounds better than the average MP3), and capacity (twelve tracks in your pocket!). Scott had some operational troubles, too: ¡°It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.¡± The ultimate insult comes at the end, though: "Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?" |
