The unboxing was very nice, and the quality of the product is easy to see. But...
As much as I understand Soundbrenner's need for monetisation, depriving the users from using metronome functionality (like the increasing tempo) unless they pay more money feels wrong. After all, I have just paid more than €200 for a metronome, so I expected it to be full of features out of the box. The video lessons? The collections of songs? Those are add-ons that I'll evaluate later if I want to pay for them or not. But the metronome that I bought cannot do basic things that even software metronomes can, unless I pay even more money.
The android application looks promising, but it's still far from perfect:
- It asks for permissions that I just don't understand. Location? Does the app really need to know my location to pair with the Core? I find that very, very hard to believe.
- It led me to believe that registration was indispensable. And it asked me for things like my main instrument (I play two), my main genre (I don't have one), and my skill level (what for?). All those things I'm not comfortable discussing with my metronome's maker, to be honest.
- The synchronisation is not perfect (e.g. when I start the metronome from the phone and stop it from the device, sometimes the application doesn't get updated).
- The worst part, though, is that the application sits there, draining battery happily, and I can't remove the notification (unless I remove the notifications permission). I really would have preferred a less intrusive application, and a device that doesn't depend that much on my mobile phone. Luckily I have a smartphone, what if I didn't?
I asked the same questions to their technical support, and they gave out-of-the-box answers, that didn't answer any of my concerns. I'm, to be honest, a bit disappointed.
