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Enter, button-less MP3 player

Anand Parthasarathy

Looks like a futuristic piece of drawing room decor; control depends on the direction of push

Techno chameleon: The Aigo Omnisphere MP3 player has no buttons and changes colour with volume and beat.

Bangalore: You can no longer tell an MP3 device by just looking at it. These iconic music players come disguised as artifacts, table lamps — anything except a boring piece of technology.

Aigo’s Omnisphere F 529, a made-in-China offering that has just come to India, looks like a futuristic piece of drawing room decor… a smooth and glowing cone whose see-through head dances with colour with every change in volume and tempo of the music it belts out.

Colours galore

They claim 4096 colour combinations — but we did not count! Clearly aimed at the average untechnical dummies among us, it has no buttons: the top of the cone can be swivelled — and acts as the play-select-stop control depending on the direction you push.

Its shape makes its sound omni directional and the 5 Watts it produces is rich and clear. The built-in 1 gigabyte of storage is good for about 500 songs but at a pinch can be used as simple storage for files, videos or whatever: a USB-type slot tucked away in the base, allows you to link to other devices such as a PC or music system to exchange files, while a memory card slot allows you to extend the built-in storage by a GB or two.

Distributed in India by BridgeOne Technologies, the Omnisphere costs Rs.5,200 and if you like a music player that will instantly become the first talking point of every guest coming home, this might be something for you.

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