I went to Circuit City yesterday and returned my Karma for a refund. This is not a decision I arrived at quickly, and it's not one that's easy for me. For quite awhile, I have been wishing I could find a portable player with even a fraction of the functionality of the empeg, so when the Karma was announced, I was very interested. I followed the rumors and status updates pretty closely, and once I heard the first few reviews trickle in, I decided I wanted one. After a few days of use, I posted these comments, in which I cited a lot of problems and concerns about the device. Well, after a week of heavier use on a long vacation, I found more problems, and decided that the Karma's positives just don't outweigh its negatives given its rather high cost.

Now, "high cost" is a relative term, in that everyone here is in a slightly different financial situation. What's "worth it" to one person might not be "worth it" to someone else. Someone with a lot of disposable income may be more willing to keep a device with a lot of quirks and not the exact interface they want, whereas another person with less cash to throw around might want the *perfect* portable MP3 player for their $350 or so. I don't think this device is completely worthless, I just don't think that in its present form it's worth that much money.

So what aspects of the Karma am I disappointed in? Some of these will be repeats from my last post, but just for clarity, I'll go over them anyway. These factors are loosely in order of how much they bothered me.
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Stability
This is the dealbreaker. The thing just reboots/locks up far too often, even for a 1st-gen device. Based on posts made here and on another BBS, it's clear the Karma development team is aware of a multitude of problems which are causing Karmas to reboot or even lock up completely. These have been known about for a week or two, and haven't been fixed yet. They may be fixed tomorrow, the next day, or the next week, but for right now, one cannot simply pick a playlist and expect that an hour or two later, that playlist will still be playing. I even ran into another problem where the player doesn't reboot, but the current song stops playing and it skips to the next track. I'm told this is also a known problem, and will also be fixed soon. But when you're listening to a 2 hour long PaulWay mix and you lose your place because the Karma decided to skip tracks on you, it's very bothersome.

I understand the Cambridge team was under immense pressure to make the Karma happen in time for the holidays, but it just amazes me that problems this pervasive can make it out of alpha testing, much less beta testing. I had spontaneous reboots within minutes of playing the device for the first time, and even with the most recent firmware possible, I still got them far too often.

Quirky menu navigation
The joystick and wheel combo is a very clean, compact, and efficient combination, but I just don't feel they're used right. There are numerous comments about it here and elsewhere, and some people seem to like it. Maybe it's the placement of the wheel that makes it less useful for me, maybe it's the speed or acceleration of the wheel's controls... But I just find it useless for navigation and selection unless it's the only option (where it is in a few places.) The mechanism for navigating multi-field screens such as the equalizer and some of the Options screens just doesn't seem intuitive.

I am not saying that I have any better ideas in mind, but it seems to me that the empeg car is much easier to work with, and it has pretty much the same structure (the empeg's buttons can be considered a 4-way joystick, and the empeg's knob and karma's wheel are both a rotary device that can be pressed.) The Karma even has extra buttons (the joystick press, the menu button, and separate vol+/vol- buttons.) Yet somehow, even after some practice, I couldn't get used to how the Karma's menus and screens operate. Others will disagree, but I don't think the Karma is easy to use at all.

Lack of a usable protective case
I paid $400 for this thing and got a black felt bag. Come on. Yeah, I can go buy a Gameboy Advance or similar case that may or may not fit, but how much could it have possibly cost to ship these things with a real case? Even the empeg car had a snug-fitting case from just about its inception.

The thing just lacks "polish"
I don't know of any other way to categorize some of my miscellaneous gripes, but they are important enough to me that I want to cite them here. For instance, unless I missed some magical button combination or setting, it takes an absurd amount of joystick, button, and knob clicks (14 if I count correctly) to switch from shuffled to unshuffled playback. That's just terrible.

Then there's the Plays counter, which operates the same as it does on the empeg, in that it increments after 5 seconds. It's not so noticable on the empeg, since nothing is really done with play counts yet unless you use custom shuffle modes. But on the Karma, the Rio DJ uses play counters for many of its modes, so they become important. Given this fact, why couldn't they implement a more sensible mechanism, where it gives you perhaps 1/3 or 1/2 of the duration of the track to decide whether you want to play or skip that track? With only 5 seconds to decide, the plays-based Rio DJ modes are useless to me. With a proper algorithm in place, I think they might be cool.

How about tweak functions? One can argue the Karma has a lot of other added playback features like Rio DJ modes that ensure you'll be hearing mostly what you want for a particular mood... But what if you go into your listening not knowing what "mood" you're in? The "tweak" functions are perfect for this scenario. You do a random shuffle, and then when something strikes your fancy, hit the proper tweak function for your mood. Why aren't they there? Someone who's never owned an empeg car might not notice this absence, but it's a serious deficiency for me.

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Ultimately, I think that the Karma is a nice little device, with a lot of potential. If marketed well, I think it has an outside shot to be an iPod-killer. The battery life is outstanding, synchronization is lightning quick, and overall, it's got a lot more upside than the iPod. But too much of that upside is quickly forgotten when the song you're listening to suddenly stops as the device reboots.

This is just my opinion, but it looks to me like DNNA really screwed the pooch by trying to rush the Karma out before Christmas. If the Karma in its present state got into the hands of a reviewer from TechTV or a leading online review site, I'd be scared to see the results. I know a lot of things can be fixed in time, and maybe they will, but if you want to be an iPod-Killer, you better realize you're arriving late to the party, and better be able to match up from day one. Otherwise, nobody will take your product seriously, and will flock to the market leader with the funny ads on television.

As for my situation, I've decided that although I would really like to have a portable player right now, I want to make sure that I buy the right one. The Karma seems to have more potential than the current generation of iPods, but if it doesn't sell well, I don't know if that potential will be fully realized. If the stability is addressed in future firmware, new features are added, and some of the UI quirks are worked out, I can see myself buying another Karma in the future. Until then, I'll be on the sidelines for this one, and enjoying my empeg, which 3+ years later, is still the best MP3 player for me.