Review: Electrobox Mishake portable media player

Electrobox’s Mishake player is an interesting attempt to literally shake up the media player market with a new way to control your music and video. Perhaps inspired by the success of Nintendo with its motion-sensing Wii remote, the device can be tilted or shaken to skip between tracks or to control the extra features.

It offers quite a lot in theory, with audio, video and photo playback, an FM radio, voice recorder and customisable backdrops. You’ll also find a handful of quirky additions that use the motion sensing such as a digital spirit level, 'dice shaker' and a step counter that can be used for walking or running.

The bulk of the functions are controlled through the 2.4in touch-sensitive screen's display and it comes with an attachable stylus to help in this regard. Unfortunately this was often quite frustrating in our tests because the display tended to be quite unresponsive (and there was always the danger that an inadvertent nudge was going to skip us back and forth between tracks). You can temporarily disable the motion sensor by hitting the power button, which acts as a lock switch, or turn it off altogether, though this really defeats the point of the player.

We were quite impressed by the clarity of the display but to get video on to it you’ll need to use the converter program supplied, which is annoying although it is quite fast and easy to use. Music and photos can be dragged and dropped straight over using Windows but we weren’t particularly impressed by the sound quality, which, although it improved when we replaced the rather poor earphones supplied, isn’t up to today's standards.

Throw in the lack of control over your media and the fact that it’s only available with 4GB of internal storage (that can only be upgraded by another 2GB using a microSD memory card), and you’re left wondering whether there are enough distinguishing features for it to be a success. The unique impact of the m otion-sensing controls is only really worthwhile when it comes to the extra features and we can’t see people using these very often.

The Mishake doesn’t have quite enough going for it in terms of performance and usability, which makes its unique selling points rather redundant and for the price there are better players out there from rivals such as Apple and iRiver.

Vista compatible: Yes