On Our Desk - 16

Icy Box IB-MP101

Manufacturer: Icy Box
UK Price (as reviewed): £97.94 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): N/A

Since the release of the iPhone, a remarkable number of portable media players and mobile phones are slim, black and feature large screens. The Icy Box IB-MP101 falls neatly into this category but, unlike most of its fellow iPhone emulators, it also plays digital TV in addition to digital media from an SD memory card.

The MP101 supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats at resolutions up to 1,080 x 1,024 and aspect ratios of 4:3 and 16:9. If video or images from outside those parameters are used then the video simply won't play - so consider yourself warned before you start sending angry letters around. Or emails. Nobody sends letters any more.

Frankly, the build quality is nothing to write to Apple about and the buttons don’t always work, which makes navigating the ugly menu system - not to mention playing the built-in Tetris clone - as much fun as hitting yourself in the head with a dead pheasant. Or a live pheasant. Nobody uses dead pheasants any more.


The MP101 features a built-in speaker and a collapsible aerial and ships with a 3.5mm jack to component video adaptor and a larger magnetic aerial for better TV reception.

There's also a mini USB socket which charges the device, but it doesn't allow you to add or remove files to or from the SD card should you have one plugged in. This is frustrating as the recessed memory card slot has a rubber dust cover which is convenient but mighty fiddly and a royal pain in the storage device to work around.

With earphones plugged in, sound quality isn’t totally awful, but it’s nothing to write home about either and won't leave you stunned. The tiny onboard speaker - much like other mobile devices - is merely adequate at best.

When it comes to actually watching digital TV the MP101 has a handy auto scan feature that, when we used it, picked up numerous terrestrial and freeview channels. However, very few of them actually wanted to play on the device and would stutter in and out of reception. Furthermore, once the channels have been scanned out, there's nowhere in the menu that allows you to flick through them quickly without having to surf them one by one, like some kind of lazy drunk student who’s bone idle nature prevents him to check a TV guide.


As it is, despite the fact that we tested the TV reception from several high-vantage points in the centre of London, we still found ourselves wading through plenty of "Bad or No Signal" error messages, which was perplexing to say the least. The main draw of the MB101 for many people will be the ability to watch TV on the go, which we couldn't even get working in the middle of the nation's capital!

The only time we got a really decent picture was when picking it up and turning it on after a lunch break (and a quick Thai massage to ease the stress caused by using it) to find a perfect picture on BBC News 24. Moving it around just a few inches meant the difference of a perfect signal or no signal at all, which most likely points towards the aerial being pretty flaky.

Considering it was tested five stories up in the heart of Central London, it’s not like you can blame the poor signal quality on us being in the middle of nowhere either.

Verdict: The MP101 is a shoddy mishmash of features and functionalities that simply doesn’t work very well and isn’t worth the cheeseburger that you could buy with the change you'd be left with if you did buy it.