iubi Blue - TechRadar UK

Ah, the tragic cost of a terrible interface. The iubi has one of the most vivid screens in its class - although it's only 480 x 272 and could really do with a punchier backlight - but its Operating System and button layout are just awful.

A huge part of the blame lies entirely at the feet of a single button. In the middle of the fairly traditional directional control pad, there's a button marked M. On almost any other device, pressing this centre button would select or play something.

Here, it either stubbornly does nothing or pops up a further menu. You have to press the play button below the directional pad to select or confirm any action. So, we've got a primarily useless button sat directly where the most useful one should be. Years of gadget usage makes it almost impossible for this illogical layout to become second nature.

The on-screen interface is similarly hobbled. A row of four tiny, bland icons at the top of the voluminous screen is a terrible waste of space, and there are no sub-divisions for video, audio and images. One "play" option is your lot, and clicking that just brings up an ugly, simplistic file and folder browser that lumps everything in together.

Video files display a thumbnail (eventually), but that's the sole nod to contemporariness here. Actually playing a video spams the screen with all manner of irrelevant and ugly numbers, but fortunately this fades away after a couple of seconds, until you press a button again.

There is absolutely no metadata read from audio files, so make sure you give them explanatory filenames if you want to know who they're by, what album they're from and the track number.

Wireless - but not

All that said, videos do look good on it. If you just want a reasonably good-looking device that you can just slap a load of video files (a healthy range of codecs are supported) onto and then never use it for anything more complicated than selecting one and pressing play, if you can find the right button, this is the one for you. It has a pleasantly understated design and so it's still a fairly luxurious-feeling object despite its foibles.

Oh, and the "Blue" refers to the iubi's Bluetooth wireless capability. It's a bit of a red herring though, because all it supports is wireless headphones, which is a technology yet to truly prove its worth.

Some sort of Bluetooth file-sharing would have been much more useful, but then the limited bandwidth of the technology would have meant agonisingly slow uploads anyway. As it is, the Blue's standard mini-USB cable connection and drag and drop uploads are just fine.

A year ago, this would have been an impressive player. Yet it's just not a stellar enough performer to overcome its interface foul-ups. If you find one dirt-cheap, do consider it. Just be completely clear that there's no way you'll be able to sensibly use it as a music player too.