Product Review
Product name: Lola
Product type: Remote Control Software
Ports: USB Cable
Controls: Software user interface
Likes: Enables remote control of networked music
Dislikes: User interface, support, registration glitches
Review
Lola is billed as a “Wireless Music Player System”, which
is stretching it, even for marketing speak. The product is composed of a
Windows software application, a USB transceiver, a handheld remote and a package
of cabling. Although the package technically allows you to play music through
your stereo and control music through your TV, it is not a very practical
approach for most household configurations.
Lola’s approach to playing disk-based music through your
stereo is to offer you a mini-plug to RCA cable, something you can easily and
cheaply purchase at any Radio Shack or other electronics store. In order to
view the software’s user interface on your TV, Lola provides an RCA-plug video
cable, as well as an S-Video cable, both of which are easily purchased from many
retail and online locations. Your PC must have either a video out port (rare)
or an S-video port to make use of either of these cables. This approach is not
terribly useful because most people do not have a PC near enough to their stereo
or TV to take advantage of a direct cabled approach.
The software, which must be downloaded from a Web site,
installs easily enough, but I was never able to successfully register it, no
matter how many innovative approaches I tried. The tech support option was even
more useless. Most of my emails went unanswered. The only reply I ever got from
tech support insisted that pretty mush all of the world’s problems were my
fault, not the least of which was my pathetic inability to register a simple
software product. After experimenting with the product for a few days, I
realized that it had such limited value that registering it was not worth my
time any way.
Like every digital audio player in the world today, this
one creates yet another music indexing database and offers yet another nearly
unfathomable user interface. The digital audio world will never fully take off
until standardized data structures and user interfaces are defined and adopted.
It is highly unlikely that the simplistic user interface offered by this product
will add much to such a standardization effort.
The one redeeming feature in this package is the handheld
remote. It’s an RF-based device, rather than IR, meaning you can control the
software from anywhere in the house, not just from a line of sight position.
The USB transceiver receives the radio-frequency command streams and converts
them to “mouse clicks” which manage the music playing software. Many of the
remote’s functions, like play, pause, next song etc., can be successfully
utilized without resorting to the software’s user interface for visual cues.
Capabilities like searching for individual tracks, or selecting playlists
require the ability to view the user interface while manipulating the remote
control. Finally, the remote control does broadcast I/R signals in addition to
radio frequencies, and it does have the capability to act as a mini-universal
remote.
Summary: This product can be had for as little as
$25, even though the claimed retail price is $299! Even at $25, the utility is
so minimal that it will appeal to a very limited audience.
