Cute but cr..er..rubbish

The i-Walk portable media player is very, very cute. But it's very, very cute because its design is almost exactly the same as Apple's original i-Pod Nano - and a design released in the past few days is a very close copy of the latest Nano.

Apple makes its iPod in China - which is where the i-Walk is produced - or at least its components are. For example, the Chinese made mains plug doesn't fit the sockets in the market where the product has been launched meaning that every purchaser has to buy an adapter, or face the long, slow process of charging from a USB socket. Even after three hours plugged into a USB socket, the battery indicator showed "empty." The driver / tools disk is in English and Chinese. Signs on the components are in Chinese.

The headphone jack is not a standard size meaning that purchasers cannot improve the sound quality by adding better headphones from e.g. Sony.

Not that Sony would be especially pleased - in the appallingly written manual, the first line is " This machine is a new generation digital Walkman..." - a clear breach of Sony's trademark.

We have had two machines which i-Walk claims to be the sole distributor for. However, we have also seen precisely the same case with a variety of names. i-Walk markets several other models. However, we have had to return them both because of terminal faults. i-Walk has been less than helpful, leading us to consider that quality control and service are at best secondary and at worst unimportant.

This was supported when we looked at the i-Walk website: the site is incomplete but it advertises a specific model for a specific price. In i-Walk's own primary retail outlet, the shop assistant quoted a price of some 40% higher than that appearing on the company's own website.

These are the problems we found:

1: the machine did not charge from USB - apparently, this was because of an undocumented feature: it has to be turned off using a slider switch for charging to work. With the second machine, we left it plugged into USB for charging. The device became warm but, as noted above, the battery indicator showed "empty" after three hours. It played for less than one minute.

2. the drive was recognised when plugged into USB - but none of the directory structure or content was visible on any of the computers - XP, 2000 and even Linux we tried it on. The shop replaced the machine because would not reformat for them. Quite how a user is supposed to think to reformat a player is beyond us.

3. The second machine would not charge at all, from USB or mains. However, in the shop, it did recognise charging from USB using their laptop. We were then told that the machine would be upset if the computer had WiFi installed. DUH! Most modern laptops come with WiFi installed - and many desktops now use that technology, too. We should de-install the WiFi, the shop suggested.

4. Even when it was The shop's solution to that was to reformat the device. This they did, put some test material on and gave it back. The device manual claims that it plays wma format: we put a wma file on it: the device reported that it did not recognise the format - "format error" showed on the screen.

5. The test material put on by the shop included an Acer graphic in bmp format. We deleted it - the device then stopped registering on the PC, or rather it registered but no directories or content show on the PC. We tried to reformat, following the steps in the shop, but the device would not reformat. The files we had placed on it remained on the machine, according to the machine's own display. We also used the provided software which warned us that all content would be lost: it wasn't - the device did not format.

6. The buttons are incredibly slow to respond leading to repeated pushing.

7. It is impossible to use the manual to try to solve any of the problems because it is so badly written that it makes no sense at all. Examples: "long timely press "mode" to enter the condition" and "firmware upgrading software isn't fit for other serial players.The opposite is the same." But our favourite is "The common users of MP3 will be disturbed by "Materials outlet ting" who are not content the "personal materials" seen by others. It will cause big trouble that they have to delete all the private things before lending their MP3."

This player says it has a long list of features: MP3, MP4, WMA (for the few minutes were were able to get a directory listing onto the PC, we did play the WMA file - on the PC but it refused to play on the player), WMP, Radio, other file storage.

We have been completely unable to test most of these claims because we have not been able to work the machine. It's cute but it's rubbish.

We don't know how many other people have had the same trouble. Certainly, we have seen a number of these units being sold.

We tried to get our money back (surprisingly, we do actually go out and purchase some of the items we review, and don't rely on PR departments sending us devices as our sole source of products for testing) but the shop started to give us the run-around, telling us we had to go to an outlet in another building.

So not only is the device dreadful, so is the customer service of the people marketing it. We told them that it would be reviewed and that we intended to deal with all of the complaints we had had with two machines. The salesman's answer was that he is just a salesman and if we would have to discuss our problems with his managers in another shop: he did not offer to get the manager to speak to us, nor to resolve the problems.

But we don't have to take them to task: far more at risk than our few pounds are the reputations of Apple and Sony whose design and trademark are abused by this awful device.