I Found My Gigabeat

In cleaning my room I found down beside my bed on a dusty and generally unseen shelf, the bottom of a bookshelf, my old Gigabeat, from the S series. This was (is) an MP3 player from a few years ago.

It's amazing how fast everything moves, that this would go from a great item to a piece of crap just like that. Within three or four years.

The truth turned out to be it was a piece of crap all along. One of the typical criticisms of the Gigabeat was that it periodically erased everything on it. That was a shocker when it first happened, and it never got better with subsequent experiences.

I was just searching around and it looks like, maybe, they might still sell some variation of the thing. Or maybe the ads are just old and not removed from the internet. They ought to hook up a Gigabeat to the internet. I'm sure it would gladly remove all the files!

We had two of these, three for a while. But I only had the third because the place I bought it from accidentally sent me two instead of one. Real competent. Then they wanted it back. I delayed for a while but they actually called me on the phone, I believe, yes they did, so I mailed it back. Too bad I didn't send them all back, or, better yet, not have ordered the crap in the first place.

I remember one time, I hadn't had it for long, I was playing volleyball and it fell out of my pocket and got all scratched up in the sand. Plus I had to dig a few pieces of sand out of the controls. That's a drag ... because the scratches never went away. So that's another thing. It was terribly scratchable.

The power cord was still with it. I thought about plugging it in and charging it up and maybe seeing if I could use it for a portable, tiny hard drive (it had 60 gig!) for my laptop computer. But I don't really have any big reason to do so, of course, because the laptop has plenty of storage space. And, to tell the truth, I wouldn't trust a Gigabeat as a scratch pad.

After having my iPod Touch for the last couple years, the Gigabeat feels big and clunky. I really thought the name Gigabeat was a cool one at the time, but now it's just a word that means undependable and failure to me. I wouldn't buy anything made by Toshiba, they did such a bad job with this thing.

Wow, looking at the ad, they have an iPod Touch now with 64 GB, the newest model as of this writing. Mine, like I said above, is a couple years old, and it is only 16 GB. So I really have to pick and choose what I'm going to put on it. But it doesn't make too much difference. I put stuff on, I take it off. It gives me something more to do with my time, to keep shifting things around. It's like living in a small apartment. But 64 GB, that'd be a mansion.