Set up was easy, though it took a while. Upon first synch, m:robe does a lot of file transferring back and forth with the PC, which is a nuisance, but thankfully just a one-time problem. When everything is up and running, you can access your photos and music in Olympus' m:trip software, a sort of hybrid of Apple's iTunes and iPhoto. In the software, sandwiched between the music and picture managers, is the Remix Cube builder. You select photos and music along with a template that sets the visual tone—"flashback" fades or "geometric" wipes and transitions. Press play and you get a fairly snazzy animated slideshow viewable on the PC or, if you choose to save it, the m:robe itself.

The m:trip software is a little buggy still. The version I tested (v. 1.02) couldn't sort artists alphabetically in the main window, something so clearly flawed I can only assume it will be fixed soon. For the time being, I locate individual artists in a search box, then load them to the player.

Once you shift photos and music to the m:robe, you can still do a lot with them. If you paste song lyrics into the manager, you can pull them up on the device while listening to a song, and you can sort songs in many different ways, for instance, previously unplayed tracks, or music by a certain composer.

You can also take pictures with the built-in 1.3 megapixel camera. It's not great, and the photos you take look worse on such a nice LCD screen than they would on, say, a camera phone's display. Also, there's no shutter button; to take pictures, you have to tap the screen, which can lead to shaky stills. But since you can build more Remix Cube slideshows on the device itself, it can be fun to snap away then quickly animate your pics.

I say quickly, but the interface can be confusing, and it's sometimes hard to undo something you've done. For instance, adding music to the "favorites" playlist is easy, but I haven't figured out how to remove them from it. Same thing goes when you add photos to the "favorites" list. This leads to problems when you're building a slideshow, and short of synching the m:robe, the only way to resolve this is to delete your "favorite" pictures and start anew. There are other photo albums you can make slideshows from, but I haven't figured out a way to create new albums without first synching to the PC.

What this means is that the m:robe, certainly one of the more original ideas around, is about three software updates away from being a lifestyle-enhancing product. In the meantime, it's a space-age oddity, albeit one that makes you look cool just holding it.