Alright troops – listen up! Today we’re going to discuss how to turn time-travel, a scientific and explorative activity, into a set of deadly weapons designed to maim, murder and mutilate. Why you ask? Well, just for asking that I’m going to time-bomb you into a leper colony. That’s right douchebag, enjoy your leprosy.

As soon as new technology is developed, crazy people will start figuring out how it might be used in a combat situation. This is a natural and organic process, and we shouldn’t interfere. We can however speculate as to the wartime applications of time-travel technology.

As I explained in previous weeks, time-travel devices won’t just take you through time if you happen to be touching them, but will in fact suck everything within a certain radius through to a different point in time. Now, let’s say you take that device, strap it to a hunk of metal and set it on a timer so that when the clock hits zero, it warps everything in a three-metre radius into the past. (or future)

Stick that hunk of metal into an RPG, set up some kind of mechanism whereby launching it triggers the countdown, and blammo! You’ve got yourself a ticking time-bomb. Of time.

Radical, yes? Yes.

Now – a regular time-travel device will need to be carefully and precisely calibrated to protect whatever it’s transporting. Time-travel devices will also need to take into account the fact that the Earth is spinning through space, and travelling one hundred years into the past without adjusting your exit co-ordinates to stay in roughly the same point on the planet will leave you floating through space at the point where Earth will be in exactly 100 years.

Time-bombs will not need to take these delicate matters into consideration. After all, the aim is to deal some damage, not to safely transport something through time. What the hell do you care if you zap your enemies into space, right? They’re unlikely to be giving you any more trouble after that. Similarly, if, say only your opponents legs and torso get transported, what’s left behind probably won’t be much of a tactical threat. Time-bombs are destructive, unpredictable and, as you can probably tell from the fairly graphic mental image I just left in your mind, pretty devastating.

Ramp up the radius of material to be time-travelled and you’ve got yourself a time-nuke. Or, as I will call it, a chrononuke. (that is one sweet name) Suddenly you’re flinging entire cities into prehistoric orbit. It’s devastation on a massive scale, with zero debris/radiation left behind.

Potential problems (besides the obvious ethical ones) with time-bomb technology:

1. If you don’t set the timesplosion to take your target far enough back in time, they might reappear in the place the Earth was a few hours ago, and hurtle down from 30,000 feet, possibly landing on you in the past.

2. Once time-bombing technology is widespread, combatants will wear protective space-suits and carry time-travel devices pre-set to a specific place and time, so that if they were zapped into the past they could quickly nip back to where they came from, reload and come gunning for you. Once they’re safely back at headquarters they could even do a little research on the person that time-bombed them, then go back a century or so and punch your grandpa so hard in the kidneys, he’s too unwell to attend to masquerade  ball where he met your grandma. Existence is doomed, paradox-city, end of everything. Does that make you happy? Cos I gotta say, it sounds kind of entertaining to me.

The End.

Dammit I should have used the pun ‘killing time’ in there someplace.

Oh, oh! Also, time-bomb launchers should have badass scopes so you can time-snipe people from far away.

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No, not Blur the band! I ran out of enthusiasm for those guys the day I saw Graham Coxon’s segment on MTV Cribs. No, I’m talking about Blur the vidyagame, from Bizarre Creations, and published by Activision. ‘Just another racing game?!’ I hear you cry — ‘no!’ I say, ‘this one has licensed vehicles and guns and fireballs and stuff!’

Yeah that’s right. Guns ‘n’ shit. Activision were kind enough to let us run a few laps in advance of the game’s release on May 28th, and we liked what we saw. Essentially it’s Mario Kart with proper cars. Weapons are scattered around the track and include lasers, homing fireballs, shields and explosive explodey things. Oh, and boosts, and health packs to bring your car back into tip-top condition. Crashing and getting hit with enemy weapons will drain your life bar pretty swifty, at which point you explode, and have to wait to be put back on the track. In multiplayer mode, races are astonishingly balanced and frantic. Even though I was the best player there, somehow my useless opponents kept catching up and nearly winning, or winning. It’s guaranteed to keep everyone screaming and ranting right up to the chequered flag, in any case. A real blast.

geometry-wars style laser-shows are the order of the day

And if you don’t care for licensed vehicles, let me tell you why you should. See, I’m totally in the dark when it comes to cars, the only motorcarriage I’v ever fantasised about owning is a DMC 12 — but what I do know is that any time car manufacturers allow their products to be represented in-game, those vehicles usually take zero damage, and no matter how hard you smack ‘em into the crowd-stands, they’ll never suffer so much as a scratch. It’s annoying, boring and limits those racing titles to simulation fans who get giddy over a nicely polished tailpipe, and model-accurate oversteer. Blur lets you beat the crap out of cars, and puts the focus squarely on wrecking stuff. Which is where it belongs.

This also means Blur may also have the widest potential audience of any racing title — it’ll please the franchise-fans, who’ll doubtless get a giddy thrill out of seeing their pristine objects of desire thoroughly trashed, and it’ll please gamers raised on Mario Kart and F-Zero, whose only interest in cars is seeing them get all crumpled and broken.

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Some people will drone on and on about time machines, and how we might build them, what they would look like and whether they would travel through time and space or merely through time. That is not what we will be discussing today. Today we’re talking about time-travel’s effect on history. It’s going to be fascinating, you’re all going to thank me, so let’s just get started.

Now, this is all very complicated and it’s possible to get waaaay too deep into this stuff, so we’re going to breeze lightly over the three main competing theories like a dandelion seed caught in an updraft. We’ll highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each theory, with examples from movies and TV all the way to help you out. By the end of this instructive series of tutorials you’ll be able to watch a film about time-travel and exclaim, “Hogwash and Poppycock! This film appears to subscribe to a flexible-history theory of time-travel and yet this paradox is one typically seen in a fixed-timeline scenario! I shall write to Ofcom, and they will understand and subscribe to my e-newsletter.”

Not yet, though, because today we’re only covering the flexible-history theory.**

Right! Strap in kids, I’m taking you on a journey through knowledge!

Flexible-history theory:

This theory is very popular, and allows for time-travellers to alter the course of history by their actions. History is flexible, and if I go back in time and kill Hitler, well then Hitler is just bally-well going to stay dead and we’re just going to have to bally-well deal with the consequences. Dr Who and Back to the Future (for the most part) subscribe to this popular theory, because it allows for all sorts of fun in terms of avoiding one’s distant relatives and being very careful not to disturb anything in the past. Normally this translates into costume changes, which is always a laugh. It also raises the stakes — one error and you’ll forever alter history, dooming humanity or preventing the invention of time-travel and thereby trapping yourself in the horrible, icky past.

The downside of this theory is that when you think about it, it’s a bit weird. For instance, Marty McFly experiences the dangers of messing with the past first-hand when he screws up his parents’ falling in love. When it looks like his parents will never hook up, he is physically pained and starts to visibly disappear. We know why — if his parents never meet up, then he’ll never be born, let alone travel through time. He shouldn’t be there, in this new timeline he’s not supposed to exist, hence he is erased from history.

The problem is, why does that happen? This whole theory presupposes some intelligent, all-present nanny-force in the universe that’s forever going around tidying up after messy time-travelling tykes. Presumably time-travellers are just as constrained to the laws of physics as anything else — they can’t just vanish just because they’ve ruined their parents’ falling in love! If I were Marty McFly (and by God, I wish that were the case) I’d want to find the mystical force that says the continuum must be preserved and that I have to fade into non-existence, and ask him why he’s being such a douche.

Similarly, consider the memory-shifts of those for whom the past is altered. When Marty gets back home at the end of the first film, his parents of course have no memory of living in poverty, under the thumb of mean ol’ Biff — for them it never happened, because George stood up to Biff way back when and became a confident, wealthy sci-fi writer. I think most of us would agree that our experiences, memories and personality shape who we are, in which case congratulations Marty, you killed your parents. These aren’t the same people you grew up with. Those two were erased by the mystic forces of timeline-housekeeping.

Which means, of course, that when anyone travels back in time, everything that ever occurred past the point in time that you arrive at ceases to exist. All those objects, people, hell — the whole universe, gone! That’s some serious destructive power. I would like to know who destroyed it, and what happened to all the energy that was expended in its destruction.

Sometimes we’re asked to believe that major events in history are unchangeable. This is a theme popular in The Twilight Zone — for example, I go back in time with a sniper rifle to kill Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but hilariously slip on a banana peel and fall into the big torch thing at the top of the stadium. Or my gun jams. Or Hitler is wearing his ‘lucky kevlar’ that day and is unharmed by the bullet. The idea is that some events in history are more important than others, and cannot be changed.

These kinds of stories really grind my gears. Who the hell gets to decide which historical events are the important ones?! It’s that all-powerful cosmic nanny again, always thwarting my efforts and keeping the course of human history nice and neat. Well, I for one don’t like the idea of a cosmic nanny, or the continuum regulating itself, or anything else that implies that time is some kind of conscious, careful entity.

Unfortunately flexible-history theory inevitably calls for such weird measures, and that’s it’s major downfall. Next week we’ll look at fixed-timelines, and see if they make a bit more sense.* (SPOILER: They don’t.)

*Unless I get distracted by something awesome and less clever, like: ‘who would win in a fight between me and myself travelling back from the future to kill me and take my place.’

**Consider this a prime example of the timeline being altered, as I started out intending to write out all three major theories, then realised I’d expended about a billion words on just one, and retrospectively changed the article to only promise one theory. As proof of this time-squirreling madness, notice that this footnote features two asterisks, despite appearing earlier in the text!

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This video more or less speaks for itself.

Speaking of pre-order bonuses, when was the last time you turned up to grab a game on release day and found it was sold out? It’s not exactly a massive problem, right? The videogame industry is growing year on year, and retail chains are smart enough to order exactly one metric fucktonne (MFt) of every new release to ensure every braying customer desperate to fork over their hard earned cashola gets a chance to do so.

Really, there’s no need to pre-order games, apart from the awesome pre-order bonuses. Statues, art books, the little accessories that give you a warm shiver — they’re worth the extra effort, and it’s why people still pre-order. For awesome stuff.

Not bits of linen with faces printed on.

EDIT: Also, those guys should clean up their apartment. Popcorn and old takeaway flyin’ all over the shop. Also also, why aren’t they playing Street Fighter? They just got the game right?!

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OK guys, I have a splitting headache right now so I don’t want any fuss, alright? Right. Now everybody sit down and listen, because here be wisdom. TIME WISDOM. (The best kind)

Everybody wonders why, if time-travel is one day possible, we don’t see time-travellers running around in space-lycra every day, messing stuff up and generally being time-vandals. Sceptics will tell you that the fact that we don’t see time-travellers today proves that time-travel will never be invented. These people should shut up.

There are a couple of ways we might counter such joyless scepticism, but I’m only going to give you one today, because frankly the other one is so amazing it’s going to make me astoundingly rich one day, and I don’t feel like giving the secret recipe for fame and glory away for free online. As such, you get the slightly less incredible version. I stress slightly less incredible because it’s still going to blow your mind, so you might wanna put down a towel or something before reading on…

Everyone knows that light takes time to get places. Albeit, not very long, because light travels very quickly. (At the speed of light in fact — yes, that is where we get the phrase) For example, light takes eight minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth. Similarly, if you were standing on the Sun looking at the Earth through a telescope, the light hitting your telescope would be eight-minutes old. It would be eight long minutes since that light bounced off the Earth and flew back towards the Sun.

You would be seeing old light.

What you were seeing would not be what was actually occurring on Earth at that very moment.

(do you see where I’m headed with this yet?)

You would be looking…

INTO THE PAST!

Sort of. You’d be seeing what actually happened eight minutes ago.

OK — my head feels a little better. I’m a little cheered up. Let’s continue:

So the light-distance between the Earth and the Sun is eight minutes. Move further out into the solar system, and you’d be able to see, maybe, oh I dunno, a half hour into the past. Keep on moving outwards, and you’ll be able to see progressively further back.

Somewhere, almost infinitely far away, hurtling through the universe is the light that bounced off of Genghis Khan’s shiny killing-helmet, (every good dictator needs a killing-helmet) all those hundreds of years ago. If you could get to that point with an astronomically powerful telescope, then in principle you could see Genghis Kahn’s helmet, exactly as it actually was.

Now, the reason I put ‘in principle’ in italics is because you’d have to be unbelievably far away, with a telescope that was capable of looking infeasibly far into the distance for this to work. It will not happen in our lifetime.* However, the idea that we could one day break the lightspeed barrier, or travel any distance instantaneously is more palatable to some people than the notion of time-travel. Hop on a spaceship that barrels into space many times the speed of light, then when you get there, use the on-board superpowered telescope to enjoy the ancient world in street view!

If we had portal technology, this whole shebang would be easier. Just get a bunch of portals into space, where they sit like a big net catching all the light that bounces off the Earth and instantly portaling that light into your living room. Put portals at different distances in space to enjoy peering into different eras.

To paraphrase:

There’s no need for actual time-travel because we can see the past happening from our own time, using a complex system of telescopes and lightspeed spacecraft!

I know, I know — it’s madness, but all the technology we’d need will feasibly one day be invented. I prefer good old four-dimensional time-jumping, but if you simply can’t jive on that voodoo, this might just be the next best thing.

*Unless of course we solve the mortality problem within our lifetime.

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On Friday Capcom were kindhearted enough to invite us round to their place for a spot of tea. and by ‘their place’ we mean a hollowed out railway arch in South London, strewn with sandbags and rusted oil drums, and decked out with military-grade camouflage. And a coffee bar. And several rows of beautiful televisions hooked up to Xbox 360s, beckoning the assembled gaming press to get to grips with Capcom’s upcoming Lost Planet 2.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the original Lost Planet perhaps didn’t warrant a sequel, and after the disappointment that was Dark Void, we were feeling just a little mistrustful of Capcom 3rd-person shooters. After a day of Lost Planet 2’s multiplayer and co-op modes, we feel a bit better. Here’s the skinny:

Getting our fight on, we jumped straight into a team deathmatch, with eight player on each team, making for a total of 16 gamers running about shooting stuff. Once you’re happy with your character’s loadout you’ll spawn along with your team-mates, and from then on you’ll be fighting across vast areas for kills and control points. Each map is jam-packed with vehicles, weapons and machinery to facilitate your opponents’ untimely demise.

We don’t mind confessing we were totally baffled at first. Lost Planet 2’s control scheme is very workable, yet quite unlike anything else that’s currently doing the rounds. There are too many vehicles to count, and each one has a huge roster of hidden moves, triggered by pressing in the left stick and messing around with other buttons. The maps themselves were massive, and until we figured out the layout of each there was a great deal of aimless wandering, trying to find the front-line.

Gamers get their game on

Over the time we had to spend with the game, we became gradually more familiar with each weapon and environment. We got to know the strengths and weaknesses of the giant robotic scorpion, and that by pressing ‘A’ whilst piloting it we could make it jump a hundred feet into the air. (Press ‘A’ again mid-jump to make it spread its wings) We were also informed that two players piloting separate mech-suits could join them together, forming one dual-piloted super-robot.

We gradually became more familiar with the maps on offer, slowly realising that although initially complicated, many of them were deceptively simple — for example a mountainous slope filled with maze-like ravines becomes a standard battle to hold the higher ground. We particularly liked ‘Cube’ — a tight gladiatorial arena that encouraged teamwork and co-ordination, and the massive, low-gravity spacestation arena that was best navigated inside a giant robot.

The action continues underwater

Lost Planet 2’s multiplayer is one with a great deal of depth, that becomes more rewarding the more time you invest in learning the ins-and-outs of each vehicle, weapon, game mode and map. We’re a little concerned that the game will be simply too confusing for new players, and learning the ropes will be impossible when more experienced players are dealing out death in giant armoured scorpions — if Lost Planet 2 is going to steal a significant portion of the multiplayer market it’s going to have to be accessible to all.

We also got a look at the co-op mode, which will arguably be the game’s strong point. The main-game can be played by up to four people, with AI characters taking the place of any absent humans. Once you’ve completed the game in single-player, gunning through once more with a few buddies will likely prove more alluring than taking on hordes of online opponents in multiplayer mode.

Lost Planet 2 is set for a mid-May release date.

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Alright, hot-shot. So it’s the future, you have time-travel capabilities and you want everyone to know about it. You know, of course that you can’t interrupt the course of human history, as this might alter the invention of time-travel and destroy your new toy, but nevertheless you want some kind of trophy to let the neighbours know you’ve got enough wonga for spacio-temporal vacationing.

Any sane man in this situation would resolve to travel to the late Cretaceous period and bring home the head of a T-Rex. In doing so you will irrefutably prove that:

1. You are stronger than the strongest animal ever
2. You can travel through time
3. You know that a T-Rex head looks good placed above your front door. (or possibly integrated into a novelty doorbell)

However, before you go prancing off into the past, there are some things you should bear in mind.

Firstly – you absolutely must not fail. For one thing, you’ll get eaten. For another, imagine if pre-time-travel palaeontologists ever discovered a T-Rex fossil with a human skeleton inside its stomach! Chaos would ensue, it would be the end of science and time travel would never be invented. The world would likely be plunged into a Tyrannosaurus-worshipping holy war. AVOID THIS.

Next: Have you thought through the logistical issues in bringing that head back? Didn’t think so. To solve this dilemma, we have to look a little more closely at probable time travel technology…

A popular myth is that time travel is achieved by being in possession of a time-travel device, and holding onto it whilst it activates. Therefore, if you’re holding onto something else at the moment of departure, that thing will also be time-travelled. How many times have you seen Saturday morning cartoons where someone is rescued from a particular time purely in virtue of holding onto the time-traveller at the second he jumps back through time? Yeah, all the time. However, this clearly is madness. Think it through for a moment — what exactly is it about touching the time-traveller that sucks you along for the ride? If you’re standing on the ground when you time-travel, is the entire Earth moved along with you? how about all the oxygen molecules touching you? You’d end up sucking the entire universe through to a different time! It would collide with the universe you were travelling to, ending existence and it would all be your fault for subscribing to a nonsensical theory of object temporal-relocation.

No. Far more likely is that time travel devices will suck everything within a certain distance of the device through time. For safety reasons, this distance will likely be one that is roughly human-shaped. I imagine that the exact size will be slightly customisable to accommodate differently sized travellers (or if you’re feeling flash perhaps get one tailor-made to your body shape) but ultimately, you’re looking at an area roughly the size of you. Otherwise, you’d forever be bringing massive clods of earth, bits of tree, concrete and so on back with you. It would just make a mess.

Now, you’re unlikely to fit a T-Rex head in with you. If you can afford a time-travelling vehicle then perhaps you can load it in the boot, but otherwise, you’re pretty stuck. Trying to bring the whole head back with you would only result in you turning up back at your house with nothing to show for your journey but a bleeding bit of T-Rex jawbone. Not very display-friendly. I would recommend bringing some lightweight tools along with you to neatly saw your trophy into pieces, then making several trips back. If you’re careful, you can stitch the head back together once you’re done, and it’ll look every bit as neat. Follow the instructions below for more help:

Just cut along the dotted lines

Follow these simple rules to bring back a monstrous T-Rex head that’ll turn even the prissiest of neighbours green with envy.

p.s. I’m assuming that if you own a time-travel device then the means to bring down a T-Rex are also at your disposal. If not, try distracting it with a flare and then kicking it hard in the shins whilst its attention is diverted.

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You may have read some of the recent Nintendo-related news stories that have been popping up since Reggie Fils-Aimé recently went on the interview circuit. Most of the stories were big scoops such as “Nintendo say no Wii 2 yet!” and “Nintendo ‘not ready’ for HD” and other exciting things.

To sum up, Nintendo has done nothing, announced nothing, and will continue to do nothing for the foreseeable future. Pity the news press however, who have to pump out something for God’s sakes, hence the rampant rumour and speculation.

Well here’s some more. The decidedly ace fellas over at Electric Pig (or ‘leccypiggy in ‘leccyspectre jargon) have reported on a few new tidbits of info on the fabled DS2…

Apparently it might feature iPhone-style motion control, and the two screens will be closer to the device’s hinge, so that the two seem to blend together. This would be better for cutscenes and so on. Apparently dev kits have been sent out already, and the graphical capabilities of the DS2 will rival those of the Gamecube. We may even see games released for the platform by the end of the year.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s exciting news. But Nintendo’s apparent disconnection from the rest of the world leaves all this rumour feeling a little less spectacular than it should. When images leaked of the PS3 Slim, Sony went hog-mental, and sued everyone who so much as looked at them funny. That’s the soap opera drama I expect from this industry. Nintendo should be making cryptic announcements like, “we have something. It’s coming. It will change everything” and launching weird viral campaigns featuring PSP logos in bandages to drum up interest. Or at least denying rumours — fuelling speculation that the industry will soon be plunged into a landscape-shifting console war.

I dearly love Nintendo, and I honestly love the drama that surrounds a new device launch. I wish they would embrace that fun with the same zeal that other companies do. But they don’t play along, and so trying to drum up excitement when some new information comes out is hard, boring work.

The DS2 will likely be announced at this year’s E3. Then there’ll be some ads on telly or something. Then it’ll come out, and people might buy it. The End.

Picture credit: Gizmodo

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Allow me to pose you a question as old as time itself:

“If you could time travel, where would you go, and what would you do?”

Earnest and imaginative folk such as team Epic Win ask these questions hoping for an answer along the lines of, “I’d hunt a T-Rex in the prehistoric jungle, then bring back its head as proof of my victory over nature” or “I’d go back to the middle ages and teach them about electricity, thereby advancing the human civilisation from whence I journeyed a thousand years.”

Sadly the typical boring answer spat back in your hopeful, earnest face is something like, “I’d go back to the eighties and buy up Microsoft stock.”

Brilliant. Well, I’m glad I bestowed the gift of inter-dimensional travel on you. Can’t wait to see how many thousands of pounds you make. Probably enough to buy a porsche you can sleep in once your sexy young wife leaves you for the pool-boy and takes the house, you joy-stifling buffoon.

Frustrating as they are, these ‘travel back a small distance, buy up stock, get moderately rich’ plans seem to be at the front of everyone’s mind. It got me thinking, a smart plan might, for example, be to travel back to 1990, buy up lots of AOL stock and sell it all off a week or so before the first dot-com crash. (I like calling it the ‘first’ dot-com crash just to keep everyone on their toes) That would be a good idea, right?

Well, now let’s imagine you’re one of those bold investment-frontier men, stood on the trading floor with your head held high, and your keen young eyes trained on the stock ticker. Y’know, that big numbery display like in Wall Street. Suddenly you’re informed that a chunk of AOL stock has been sold. Not a big chunk by any means, but it strikes you as odd because everyone in their right mind is buying AOL stock. “Why would you sell now, when stock prices are still rising?” You ask yourself. Perhaps you stroke your stubble pensively. Perhaps you remember your father back on the farm, rake in hand, stooping to pick up a grain of wheat and then holding it up to the dawn sunrise. You recall his wisdom, his words of prudence and hear them ring clearly in your mind. You remember his firm hand on your shoulder, and his broad smile when you told him you’d made it onto your big-city accounting course, and his parting words to you, not to forget who you are, and not to get caught up in the big-city pursuit of quick money and easy living.

You know that it’s best to err on the side of caution.

You sell your own AOL stock — the investors won’t like it, but dammit you always knew this Internet thing was a flash in the pan, you’re not going to be one of the yuppies who ruins themselves on a temporary fad. The other traders see your bold movements and start selling their own AOL stock. Within hours the market is in chaos. It is the end of the dot-com dream. Switching now back to you, it’s clear that you’re responsible, you time-travelling sneak, you sold your stock when everyone else was buying, causing a chain reaction that crashed the whole damn system.

So is it not possible that:

Every economic crash in history has been caused by time-travellers popping into the past to make a quick buck?!

Clearly the answer is yes.

I hope I have demonstrated that a) this kind of madness is possible, even probable, b) that I overthink time-travel and that c) I have an incredibly poor understanding of how the economy works.

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Gadgetry pretending to the iPod-throne is nothing new. Over the years we’ve seen a whole host of mp3 players fall by the wayside as Apple’s device and its subsequent spin-offs charge to the forefront of the music-tech world.

So when we were sent this adorable little Cowon E2, I’ll be honest, my hopes were not high. But in fact, it’s a pretty decent device. Priced almost identically to the latest iPod shuffle (around £40) it’s in with a fighting chance, so let’s get down to business.

Looks-wise Apple have long stuck with their ‘it’s convenient because you can hook it to your stuff’ angle, whilst Cowon seem to be encouraging us to stick their device on our keychains with that stylish metal loop. Frankly this seems like a better idea – how often are you out without your keys? I prefer the look of the E2 – the model we recieved is in black, and it looks very much like something out of an 80’s sci-fi film, (this is a big plus)  and it’s small and light enough to lose down the back of the sofa with minimal effort.

Design-wise the E2 is pleasingly minimalist when it comes to buttons – a power button, a track navigator and volume controls are all you’re getting. There’s also an EQ button which cycles you through your sound options, a cheery sounding American voice letting you know which is which.

Sound quality is impressive, and the included headphones are decent enough. Audiophiles will of course want to use their own high-end phones, but these are at least better than the tin-cans the iPod ships with. One glaring omission however is a lack of left/right signage on the earbuds – unless you’re very familiar with the panning of your music, you’re never going to figure out which is which.

Moving onto storage space – our model has 2GB of storage space, which is very reasonable for a device designed for short bursts of activity, but won’t hold a huge amount of music in less compressed file formats. The E2 connects to your computer via an included USB cable that pleasingly fits in the headphone jack.

Connectivity is far and away the E2’s greatest asset – plug it in and open an explorer (or mac equivalent) window, then drop and drag your sound files in. That’s it. when you eject and plug the headphones in, your music will play whatever you left inside that folder. This is a great system, mainly because it’s extremely quick. Anyone who’s tried to quickly transfer a few tracks with iTunes before popping down the shops will know that cumbersome specialist software slows everything down to a crawl. This is not the case with the E2 – you can add and remove tracks with relative ease.

The downside however is that the E2 doesn’t support AAC audio. For those who don’t recognise the term, all music purchased from the iTunes store is in this format. A wide range of other music services offer their tunes in this format too. Consequently it’s unlikely you’ll be able to pop music you’ve previously purchased onto the E2.

If you happen to have all your music in file formats the E2 supports (the range is quite wide aside from the omission of AAC) then I can recommend this as an affordable and user-friendly alternative to the iPod Shuffle. If, on the other hand you’re one of the many people who rely on iTunes and similar software for your music, then you’re advised to look elsewhere.

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