The iPod has a very small rival. The mobiBLU Cube is a 1 inch MP3 playing cube that is currently only available at walmart.com in the U.S. Baynews9 reports that walmart.com is selling over 1,000 of the cubes online per day.
Raul Vazquez, vice president of marketing at walmart.com, estimated that traffic on the Web site was up double digits this past weekend over a year ago. The most popular item is a one-inch cube-shaped digital music player that's available only online - 1,000 units of the $100 cube, are selling per day, he said.
Some of the mobiiBLU features include a FM radio tuner, an OLED display, a built-in clock and a sleep timer. It has a built-in voice recorder which may help students record lectures from their professors. It also has a USB 2.0 flash drive so you can connect it to your PC to transfer files. A UPI article, which calls mobiBLU a "sugar-cube-sized competitor" to the iPod, discusses the comparison of the mobiBLU Cube to the iPod Shuffle:
In August, PC Magazine's Web site called the Cube "the smallest, most impressively full-featured flash player we've seen yet."
The Cube features an FM radio receiver and voice-recording capabilities, can be used as a portable USB drive and comes in six colors. It has no ports other than the headphone jack, which is used to connect to computers and to charge the battery as well as to listen (the flip side is that one can't listen to the Cube while charging it).
The battery life is 8-10 hours, falling short of the iPod Shuffle's 12-hour capability.
"We compete head-on with the iPod Shuffle," said Bob Fullerton, director of product marketing for mobiBLU's parent company, Hyun Won Inc., "and many reviewers give the Cube a better recommendation than the Shuffle for our added features."
The Cube comes in two versions: a 512 MB for $99.72 and a 1GB version for $129. There are also six colors to choose from: black, pink, silver, blue, red and orange. The mobiBLU Cube can be found for sale here on walmart.com. More information about the mobiBLU can also be found on the mobiBLU website.
http://www.shoppingblog.com/music/
