Product Analysis:

The exterior of the 1500i is obviously miniature with iPod-like controls and a variety of color offerings including blue, black, red, pink, silver and orange. The concept behind the 1500i is to make it a sleek and fashionable accessory that you can wear around you neck, hence the necklace style earphones. The earphones wires are deliberately short, so when you are listening to your audio files, the unit hangs off of your neck like a locket. As much as we appreciate the concept, we must say the necklace idea is not as appealing as MobiBLU thinks. Even though the 1500i is a small unit, its cube design is not as attractive as a rounded figured MP3 player would look. For instance, the BenQ Joybee is one such player that deserves to be a fashion accessory with its oval shaped design with an effective exterior pattern. With that said, the 1500i is unique in its own way, but we don’t see too many of you wearing a cube around your neck. Thankfully, you can simply get a new pair of earphones and get rid of this issue. Since we already recommend you throw out the included pair of earphones/headphones, this shouldn’t be an issue anyway. It’s better to invest in a superior pair once than deal with multiple default pairs.

The 1500i features a bright OLED screen towards the front, a headphones jack at the very top, and iPod-like controls on the right side. Since the screen is so small, we are glad to see MobiBLU embed a vivid OLED screen to make it easier for everyone to read the contents without squinting. Just because the 1500i is a minuscule unit doesn’t mean it’s limited in features (we’ll get to them later in the review). The screen displays battery life, the current song information, equalizer settings and a host of other options that you normally find on regular sized portable audio players. The headphones jack is self-explanatory and so are the iPod-like controls, but we’ll go ahead and touch on them somewhat. You get the standard buttons including play/pause in the center with skip forward/backward on the right and volume up/down on the bottom of the main button.

There are two drawbacks to the exterior. The first one is that regardless the color you choose, the headphones jack (the lanyard loop) and the main controls are white. Although they don’t look terribly modest, we would’ve preferred it if MobiBLU paid some attention to color contrasts. Comparing between the controls and the headphones jack, the top area really stands out with its white coating. We believe it would’ve appeared much pleasing if MobiBLU used the same for the headphones jack as the overall unit color, and perhaps used white for the controls. While we are on the subject of controls, it leads us to our second issue with the player. Due to the 1500i’s size, the controls are difficult to work with, especially if you have broad fingertips. Although we understand that creating the world’s smallest player is a milestone in itself, there had to be a way for MobiBLU to work around that obstacle. Plus, iPod-like controls are starting to get old, so even if the controls were normal, it would’ve still been beneficial if MobiBLU worked on stylish controls themselves.