The R1 Is a 49cc!

I guess many of you wonder what's with this article's title and the Yamaha fans will even frown, maybe, but believe me that - at the end of this review - you'll have all things cleared out. Just for the record, the YZF-R1 (commonly known as simply R1) is one of the world's fastest motorcycles around, a dream-bike, aggressive and more maneuverable than other 2-wheels demons like the Suzuki Hayabusa, for example. On the other hand, the 49cc means the small, neighborhood scooter, perfect for going shopping to the grocery store or for having a run with your dog on the alleys. So I guess that now things are beginning to be a little more intelligible, don't they?

In short, what seemed to be a hell of a music player turned out to be a big disappointment; don't think that it's the beta stage which causes all this: I have seen lots of betas which worked just perfectly and loaded with cool features. And if I mentioned the R1, imagine that this article's star, the Broid R1 player behaves exactly as a 49cc scooter compared to a roaring YZF... Let's see why!

Outside the Broid R1

I admit I was totally deceived by the first (very appealing) look of the Broid R1: a very sleek and stylish interface with such a promising layout, all rounded and 3D with very carefully chosen coloring and also very ordered placement of all the elements.

Alas, for this is only the surface! Nevertheless, this outer shell of the Broid R1 looks pretty astonishing, long-time ready for Vista and also looking awesome even for the oncoming Mac Panther! Everything is rounded and beautifully shaded, with hyper-readable text and intuitive markings wherever neede, so using the graphical interface becomes a really soothing pleasure.

There are just two areas in Broid R1, one being the dockable playlist and the other the main window. The main window sports a full set of playback controls and other enhancements such as the �Digi� - some sort of 3D-wannabe visualization whose role, other than having something moving in that screen, I could not find, as it moves by itself and not according to beats or something else. The data that Broid R1 displays is common to all players (artist and song name, frequency and bitrate, elapsed and total time and repeat toggle as well). The seekbar has been placed right under the Digi and it may pass unnoticed at the first sight, while in the rightmost upper corner the minimize, minimize to tray and close buttons have been arranged.

VOL � and VOL + buttons may seem a little hard to operate for some, as they (as well as the whole GUI) are working only by means of mouse clicking, while scrolling was not implemented at all. Overall, the looks of the Broid R1 are very good, making it an almost perfect player, worthy to stay in line with the fanciest applications from, let's say Creative Labs' soundcards and the likes. Unfortunately, it is here where the �good road ends and the R1 becomes inappropriate�.

The (49cc) Engine of the Broid

If till now I've told you about a very fancy looking �R1�, it's time I also told you about how it works...and I am almost sure you won't like it either.

The worst thing happened first: as I ran the Broid R1, I wanted to load the contents of an entire MP3 directory in the playlist and then hit the volume: errm, things didn't go as planned as the Broid R1 crashed. I ran it again and tried to load a directory again and once more it crashed. I tried to drag and drop music (individual files and folders) in both player and the playlist and nothing happened. I even tried to load multiple files by means of the Add File and didn�t succeed: the only way you can add files to the Broid R1's playlist is by adding them one by one! Need I say more?

The second thing which made me wonder were the so well-hidden settings: I missed them until the last moment, before I posted my review, and was almost going to say that Broid R1 has no settings, apart from the ID3 tag editor (this is the only thing which was also obvious and worked as expected � normally, if not excellently). Nevertheless, what I discovered at the last moment was not at all what I was looking for; except for the quicklaunch �opportunity�, process priority and SMTP settings for the �send� feature, nothing ever changed.

As well, no EQ (without this being a total must), no input/output tweaking, nothing. �What the heck!� I�ve said and went further just to find that Broid R1 has no shortcuts at all and the seekbar is just an inert item, as you can't really seek at all; if you want to go back or forward, all you can use is the >> and