I’m disappointed by this review of the Medion MD 95200, the German iPod clone that was sold at retail outlet Aldi’s last week. Not the review itself, I mean, but the player, which is clearly an iPod knock-off but had a lot of potential to be a decent emulation of the real thing. Check it out: it has a touch wheel, the same screen, and even the same chipset as the iPod—all for just €200. Plus it has some features the iPod doesn’t have, like USB On The Go and a removable battery. Sadly, it sounds like for all the things the MD 95200 does right, it has a couple of glaring flaws that likely won’t be remedied. The indexes are built alphabetically, which makes sense until you get inside an album, where the player doesn’t sort songs by track number, meaning any album will be out of order. And since it doesn’t support M3U playlists, you can’t jerry-rig it yourself.
If Medion updates the firmware, it’ll be a really solid player, but they don’t even have the product listed on their site. It’s a shame, too, because more than likely Apple is going to crack down on Medion for “stealing” the click-wheel concept—this first batch of schwarzPods is likely to be the last.
Medion MD 95200 Review [DAPreview]
