Intruder in the house!

Unitech's Rome device looks and feels a lot like a standard cassette tape. When you inch closer and notice shiny buttons lining the top of it and a pair of earbuds attached to them, you'll realize that it's actually an MP3 player. The form factor, however, isn't a simple ode to a dying technology. You can actually stick the thing in any cassette player and listen to its contents by pressing "play." It's a magnificent concept, really. Unfortunately, the concept is the only thing that the $250 Rome can deliver. As you will see, the Rome is an obvious example of rushing a product to market.

My first impression of the Rome was an enthusiastic one. It's plastic, silver, extremely lightweight, and looks (and functions) a lot like a cassette adapter. A set of buttons on the top includes Volume, Stop, Rewind, FF, and Play. The second set of buttons on the side includes the Menu, EQ presets, Repeat, Random, and a headphone jack. A rechargeable Ni-MH battery resides in a hidden compartment on the opposite side (comes with a cradle and lasts a good eight hours). Although the player has a "cheap sunglasses" feel to it, I was impressed enough by its shiny design (I like shiny things). That is, until I realized that all 32MB of memory are strictly onboard.

There aren't any slots for media so you're stuck with the same thirty minutes of audio (128 bit rate). Once you do get to a Windows machine, you'll be hooking the Rome up to a painfully slow parallel port adapter. The proprietary playlist manager software is simple and effective, and the window displaying the Rome's contents includes track titles, available space, and total space. The included AudioGrabber software can rip CD audio into WAV files, but you'll have to find a third-party plug-in (or another package) to rip MP3s. And until the next time you dock with your PC, you'll be humming the same old tracks.

Now Unitech is planning on adding slots for memory cards in Version 2, expected later this year. It's also planning on adding an LCD. The current version has a tiny LED that flashes in some sort of cryptic code. Two quick flashes when the unit is playing, one drawn out flash when the unit is stopped. (Refer to the manual for further code cracking.)