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Less then a week ago, I put out a relatively cryptic call for a Canadian, and we had quite a few takers on that offer. More interestingly we had far more readers asking what we were up to.

Well thanks to fellow reader, official northern neighbor, and new honorary UNEASYian Ravi Dhaliwal – we can bring you a review of the:

Centros USB 2.0 512MB MP3 player with FM Radio (and as Ravi put it so eloquently) AKA LuxPro Top Tangent AKA iPod Shuffle Clone

The digital age seems to have bestowed upon humanity the ability to make perfect cop-ies of almost anything. Cloning may have started with the byte, but it seems to have morphed into an uncanny ability to knock off almost anything. From sheep to mp3 play-ers it would seem that our ingenuity to create is equally matched by our ability to imitate.
The Centrios 512MB MP3 player is a good attempt at a cloning an ipod shuffle. Though the actual player is slightly bulkier than the an actual shuffle (see pictures), the Centrios compensates for its increased heft by sporting an blue OLED display, a voice recorder, and an FM Radio.

At 129.99 the Centrios is not a cent cheaper than an IPod shuffle (here in canada at least). Though the added features may make it slightly more appealing to power users than a shuffle. Certainly, the OLED display makes song navigation a little easier, and allows the fm radio and voice recorder to be used with ease. Cool features include a sleep timer, power off timer and the ability to record at 42, 44, and 48 hz. All of these features are very logically placed within the menu system which is very easy to navi-gate. Also the player forgoes any itunes integration (for perhaps obvious legal reasons), and opts to show up as a simple USB HD in both windows and OSX, allowing usual drag and drop file transfer.

This is not to say that the player is without its faults.

Firstly, seeing as the point of this device is to deliver digital audio, let us discuss sound quality. The player comes with an integrated lanyard / headphone combination, while I like this concept in principle, it is terribly implemented in the Centrios. The system con-sists of a very thin lanyard coupled to a set of incredibly cheap sounding. Being a bit of an audiophile I plugged the Centrios into a set of monitor quality headphones, and real-ized that while the DSP was fine, the headphones do the unit no justice.

Secondly while the menu system on the unit is very user friendly the shuffle button on the back of the unit is simply infuriating. On apple’s IPOD shuffle, this is the button that turns the unit on, moves it from shuffle to continuous play, and finally puts the unit on hold. Sliding the switch from top to bottom powers on the unit and places the controls on hold. This allows you to quickly put the unit on hold without removing it from your pocket. On the Centrios, this logical arrangement of buttons is totally messed up by the addition of the voice recorder. Sliding the switch all the way down moves the switch to voice mode, and in order to get back to mp3 mode you either have to use the menu sys-tem to navigate back to mp3 playback or turn the unit off and back on! This destroys the functionality of the hold function since it requires significant dexterity to put the unity on hold without looking at it. This small blunder means that you can forget about hitting play putting it on hold, going for a run and deciding mid way through that the volume is too loud. In order to take the unit off hold change the volume and put it back on hold, you would have to stop, stare at the switch and try and avoid both the off position as well as the microphone position!

These gripes, aside the Centrios player is definitely worth a look, the display is nice, and beats most flash based mp3 players that still rely on hard to read LCD based displays. The FM tuner works well, and the microphone records decent quality sound files.

Having discussed the ins and outs of this shuffling clone, I’m going to rant a little, on the economics of cloning, for those of you who simply want a quick review stop reading now, for those still reading, I give you the following to ponder.

This player, is developed by a company called Luxpro, who probably spent almost noth-ing on R&D, evidenced by the lack of rudimentary end user testing that would have spotted the back button problems mentioned in this review. Regardless, this company have re-branded the player at the request of The Source (formerly Radioshack in Can-ada), in order to gain volume sales. The Source have I’m sure marked the product up to be in line price-wise with the ipod shuffle. Rather than pass on the R&D savings to the consumer, these savings are scooped up by an intermediary. By pricing the Centrios player in line with the shuffle The Source pass up an opportunity to offer the consumer a player with more features, for less money, highlighting apple’s rather wide profit margins on such a simple device as the ipod shuffle. Finally I’d like to point out that the Centrios player doesn’t auto sync with itunes. Though it should be possible to pair this device with Itunes, apple have restricted this functionality to their shuffle product regardless of the fact that any player should be able to interface seamlessly with itunes.

Finally people harp on Gates for using software incompatibility to create monopoly but Apple are just as guilty. I’d like to point out that apple uses artificial software incompati-bility in order to make their IPod line interface with itunes. The shuffle is nothing more than a stick of flash memory, however due to apple’s cleaver coding it interfaces seam-lessly with Itunes allowing people to claim that apple hardware “just works�. It is this sort of software incompatibility that has allowed apple to gain 50% of the flash player market with mediocre piece of hardware. I suppose that is the price one must pay for having thoughtfully developed software, but i’d really like to see someone out there hack the hell out of a shuffle or itunes and make all flash players interface with iTunes.

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Thank you Ravi – GREAT REVIEW!