The player is incredibly small.
I always knew it: tech you find on the shelves will always drag behind the most advanced levels. But I just bought what I believed was the top notch walkman [1] available: only just wider than a cassette tape, servos and auto-reverse function, graphic equalizer, digital FM radio…. And now I'm watching this fiddler that weights just about over 10 grams and I can hold in my palm…
The player has a jack on one side (it came with a 3 cm long cable that should serve as a connector for an auxiliary component named PC, but I can't recognize the connector… USB[2]??)
I plugged the headphones and pressed the button (there's only that one: starts and stops reproduction, alternatively) and… by Jove! Sound quality is astonishing, no hissing or back noise, virtually equal to compact disc standards - and here's where the mystery gets thicker: although I never heard the tracks stored in the player (incredibly capacious! I measured nearly five hours of music stretched over 6 complete albums[3]) I could swear to know the artists. maybe unreleased music?
Without the aid of the user-manual I would have never been able to master what follows, and my sincere applause goes to the designers for really thinking "out of the box" here. The player can "feel" the position it's in: when tilted upwards, downwards or horizontally; depending on the orientation, the button engages the volume or fast-forwards the tracks, but that's not all: somehow it recognizes when it's shaken with a certain vigor and how many shakes it receives: the number of these movements corresponds to the activation of particular functions.
Monitoring is performed via pre-recorded voice messages that provide - through the headphones - detailed descriptions on the mode you're in. Thanks to this ingenious system it is possible to control all functions with a single button.
Aimed at a dynamic youth, the Samsung Tic Toc has potential for becoming the ideal future gadget of every teen-ager on the planet.
I can't imagine boys - headphones on - shaking a small plastic cube and the Tic Toc can't be, at the current state, nothing else than a prototype of some sort... but if it's of any indication about the direction future portable audio has taken, this branch of consumer electronics is likely to become tremendously interesting.
slovo, july 1993
[1] Aiwa HS-T55.
[2] The USB standard evolved through different versions after its official release in 1995.
[3] actually, with 2GB of flash memory, the Tic-Toc could hold even more.