Physical buttons that you have to press down - clunk! - and analog dials that indicate numbers without actual digital numbers: The children of today would be utterly lost trying to use the Mint Cube. They would also very probably risk a sprained knuckle.
Those young fools can suck it. We love the retro-styling of this combination MP3 player and FM radio, which somehow manages to evoke the clean 1960s lines of Kubrick’s 2001 along with the over-the-top design of 1970s “music-centers” and 1980s Walkmans.
While the box itself is wonderful, the thinking behind it is as retro as the design. To summarize, women pick music players because they are elegant and can be shown off to friends. Men, on the other hand, only show off their gadgets when taking them out to skips tracks, and because they wear suits, they have to keep the players hidden in a bag or pocket for fear of looking “unbalanced”.
So, this line of “reasoning” continues, if the man is already hiding the gadget in his bag, why not make it bigger? It’s as illogical as the addition of Bluetooth, which is there because the player is “designed exclusively for men”, but in this case we don’t care, because the result is as awesome as it is impractical.
Three dials read out VU, radio frequency and battery capacity, and should jiggle and jump as delightfully as the needle-dials of old. The switches need a shove to get them to budge, and you even get a function from old CD players in there — the A-B interval repeat, to play a section of a track over and over. And over.
Because there is no real digital readout, you’ll have about as much control over your music as you get with an iPod Shuffle, but who cares? If Mint gets around to actually making this (and it might: Mint is behind the real-world renderings of software calculators we saw last month), then I shall be getting in line. And there’s no way this will be hidden in a manly bag. I’ll be getting all girly and showing this thing of to anyone who will look.
Mint Cube [Mint Pass]
