The Travails of an MP3 Player Hunter

In continuation to my blog recommending / suggesting a “dekho” (Indian slang for – give a look in) to the Creative Range of MP3 players, yours truly also visited a computer place to do an initial survey of the availability / price range of models.  

There is this wonderful place called Chenoy  Trade Centre (“CTC”), which has forever been a roost for any kind of computer geek or enthusiast.  My first computer had come right from there, bits and pieces sourced from the “Hajhar” (Indian slang for – Many, basically means one thousand, not that I went counting all these shops!! weak minded comedy ;)). Anyways, this place is a complex that has lots of computer shops, stocking everything from the latest Pentium processor to the trivial star screw.  Just the type of place that computer enthusiasts like me, would love to go to and chill out, going from one shop to the other, window shopping for possible acquisitionable stuff (Sure that my Grade 1 English teacher is gonna be furious for that usage!), buying CDs, asking out for prices, quotations and stuff.

So me went there this Tuesday, right before I was supposed to be out for work (Okay, for guys who don’t know me personally as yet, my work starts only at 2 in the afternoon which leaves me lots of free time in the morning to do the stuff that I want to – well no smarty pants … I don’t work for any demented job, read right below for a low down on what I do).  Well, so equipped with the Research that I had done on the net for the Creative models, specifically the Creative Zen Vision M™, the baby that I always wanted (well … what I currently want, notice the blog shouts “This is me… NOW”).  Did the calculations, told myself about the source of financing it and repeatedly told myself that I could afford it.  On the Creative ™ US website, the product lists at $329.99 which worked out to roughly about INR 15,000, well within my reach.  

But little did I know about what was to follow, for starters no one even knew about Creative™ making any MP3 players.  The first couple of shops that I asked out at looked at me as if I was an alien asking for something from home base in Mars.  I guess the people could not come to terms with the fact that Creative™ goes beyond making the Soundblaster™ and the Live!™  soundcards and the Aspire™ Speaker system.  So a couple of shops down and many more to go, I strode on, confident that I would be able to make my decision in the next couple of half-hours (just complicating the fact that I had about an hour before I needed to get to work).  

Next shop, was this place that I already knew of.  So me went there and asked him about the Creative Zen.  So I tell this shopkeeper about how it plays videos and has capacity to hold lots of photos and stuff.  He seems to understand what I was talking about and I was happy - my quest for the MP3 player was about to finish! The wise shop keeper (notice me buildup the suspense, read on and u will figure it out … I hope :D ), jumps out at me, visibly amused at my supposed ignorance of the whole thing, corrects me that it isn’t a MP3 player and should be called an MP4 player.  Main ne kaha theek hai yaar … MP4 to MP4 his sahi … I would like to see it.  The shop keeper, happy with the gyan (Indian phrase again for “knowledge sharing”) that he had just passed on, he got back into this shop of his and out he came with the piece that he called the supposed MP4 player.  It turned out to be one of those sidey Korean / Chinese stuff that on a comparison to the Creative Zen M™ that I was thinking about comes a distant last !!  

So close yet so far, and mentally cursing the shop keeper, I moved on to the next level, quickly moving past a lot of shops which I dint even want to spend my time explaining my Object of desire to.  

Went to one of the biggest shops, atleast visibly big, and asked out for the Creative ZEN player, and all that he had was a MUVO, a poorer cousin of the ZEN, a 512MB player that plays only MP3s whereas the one that I was looking out for is a player that has video capacity and comes with a whopping 30GB (I know that in the future, people will look at this comment with utter disdain, 30GB ?!? Things that they have not heard about at all when the norm is in TB – Terrabits or something bigger).  Another thing that I totally forgot to mention, getting the salesman’s attention is next to impossible in these shops.  So many people, not the customers .. hah got u guys … there are hordes of salesmen … but they are all in the mode that I call – TTLB – Trying to Look Busy !!

So after a lot of reasoning about which shop to enter and which one not to, thanks to all my math teachers who taught me the concepts of permutations and combinations, inspired by relativity (though the closest that I have been to that is the fact that I know Edison made it .. or was it Einstein … never mind they all are from the same fraternity anyways) I hovered in on this shop that looked pretty decent sized, and I went in and told the guy at the counter about what I wanted.  Past experience behind me I was in no mood to get excited about this.  

Moments later, I realized that this guy did know about it cos he was talking about prices that the website offered.  He told me that the prices aren’t really available in India, and that I would have to cough up about INR 28,000 for the same stuff (almost double when compared to the US converted figure of INR 15,000).  And 28K for this was a wee bit too high, the shopkeeper though came up with another option to it all, he asked me to get it straight from the US.  Sounds sensible to me … but where will I get someone to come from the US at the drop of a hat to get me my MP3 player ?

I faced the same when I went hunting for an IPOD™ with another friend of mine sometime ago, with the Apple guys in India charging almost double in comparison to the list price on the US Website.  But there is hope for me, for my Creative Zen M™, there is this one another place that I know in Hyderabad that had offered the US Website price when I had gone for the IPOD™.  So this weekend when you need to know where I am, chances are that you will find me at this shop in Hyderabad.  

Cheers !!


p.s. the ™ signs all across this post are just to add to the jazz, not like we are having a Intellectual Property issue out here.