While DJ-ing at school yesterday with a Panasonic boom box, I totally experienced how ridiculous it's user interface was designed. I guess the guys at Mitsushita only wanted their stuff to look cool, but it never occurred to their mind that gadgets should be "actually used by normal humans"; not to be "admired by geeks".
First of all, it uses a jog wheel to control CD song selection instead of volume; as for the volume, you use some hard to press buttons. The result is that when you try to jump to the next song, you may go "oops" and turn that extremely loose wheel too far, which make it skip 5(or any imaginable number other then1) songs instead of 1. And if you would like to charge up the volume from a scale of 20 to max (which is 50), congrats! You've got the opportunity to press that damned button 30times at a rate of 1 press per second, so you've got 30 seconds before you hear the max volume you wanted.
Second, the stop button double as the CD/tape switch. So when you want to stop a CD, and you accidentally pressed twice, congrats! You're in tape mode, and all CD controls are automatically disabled until you switch back to CD mode.
And since it's a CD/Tape combo, the guys at Mitsushita are doing what they are good at once again-mixing all the buttons together into a mess which prevents you to figure out which are for which function or which are for both.
OK, so the UI (user interface) is crap. What about the look which is intended to be cool? Well, I guess you can't expect too much from a boom box. The one I was using is OK, and the only model I would consider "cool" was the JVC that looked like a cannon (and was introduced years ago).
So the UI is mediocre and it only looks "OK". I would only buy that if it was something like half the price of others.
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