To start off as our famous dutch footballcoach probably would say. “To fall with the door into the house”: I’m gutted, disappointed and a frustrated feeling grows. And that’s the first time ever with a release of a B&O product.
Yesterday I’ve had the opportunity to play with the Moment for about 1,5 hour.
The dealer’s Moment was fully functional with the Nas with it’s own library and the Deezer account (of course)
What I expected and was hoping for the past weeks, was a device where streaming services and your own content comes together in just 1 device and topped of with a superior sound quality and smooth control.
But just after a few minutes the enthousiasm slowly faded away and was replaced by a disappointed feeling.
It started with a positive feeling as (as example) I’ve been told that you only have to enter the artist’s name, and the Moment starts searching through your own content and after that the online Deezer services and decides which is the better one and starts playing. But that’s where it already went wrong.
The search of an artist can only be done by entering his/her first character. Just only the first! After that you have to swipe through the whole collection starting with that character. So searching for lets say “Mumfords & Sons”? You have to start off with “Madonna” and you have to swipe all the way to the right…
Next thing. Trying to start a radiostation. First you need to create a collection of favourite stations via your account. But then you only have the choice of your most used and created/choosen ones. But with Netradio at the moment with over 100.000+ stations and you want to search for a specific station?
Then there isn’t also an option to search or browse through the different stations by entering it’s name. Only the option to search by genre. But then again, it needs a lot of time to find your wanted one.
Next was the playlist options. The songs within the playlist at the first screen can be played by touching them. But the problem is, that it takes a lot of time to start that specifc song, because it has to be found somewhere. And during that amount of time, there isn’t any confirmation that you have touched that song. Only a very small blinking of the “playlist”album notifies you, which can easily be missed. During that time and the fact that you have to touch very tiny small characters, you start to doubt whether you’ve touched it properly. The song isn’t highlighted as it does in the second screen. But that second screen gives far less overview of the songs in the choosen playlist.
And if you start to doubt wheter you’ve touched it properly, and you touch it again, the screen responds with the slightest form of a shivering finger (as the characters are that small and has to be touched very precisely) with swiping to the left or right. Sometimes the screen doesn’t even react or has a very late response.
In other words, I can’t take this with me at home. If I would introduce this to my familiy and for instance my spous wants to starts a specific album, she would struggle to find it. And I can imagine her reaction and expression on her face already. She will ask if I lost my marbles when I bought this product.
With all the added features in the Moment, like it’s “Moodsensing” and it’s enormeous collection of Music created by the combination of your own content and streamingservices, they totally forgot to think about where it’s all about with B&O.
The basics, just the ease of use. I think B&O concentrated to much by willing to release a different concept and overlooked the first simple (searching) basics. In my opinion, all the added functionality has to be an added feature and not the main thing to struggle through.
How is B&O going to survive if it starts releasing products that needs an introduction video before you can use it?
Location: Utrecht
