Fake Hello Kitty iPod Shuffle from eBay for £0.01

Inside of fake eBay Hello Kitty iPod Shuffle

Amy just received this amusing piece of Chinese electronic tat from eBay. It’s a Hello Kitty branded MP3 player that bears a striking resemblance to a popular brand of portable music player.

Yes, it totally looks like an iPod Shuffle if you ignore the lack of a shuffle feature and the extra holes in it. It seems these things have a problem with the audio jack where the socket makes a bad connection to your headphones if their plug is inserted all the way. Being curious we opened it up to see what was inside. The result? Mostly battery.

Inside there is a 110MAH LiPo battery and a tiny PCB that is mostly being used to keep all the external connectors together, there’s barely any electronics on it. There’s a chip I can’t read the writing of, but I’m guessing it’s a clone of an MP3 decoding chip. I wouldn’t be surprised if the LiPo battery is a clone and actually full of uranium or something lethal – we did buy this off eBay for 1p (plus £3 postage). At 110MAH it’ll probably power this thing for nine centuries; reading an SD card and hardware decoding MP3 can’t take much juice, we’re now at the level of tech where lost tribes in the Amazon are probably doing it using jungle twine and rocks.

Yes… we paid one penny for this thing. Think about that… somehow in this bizarre world we live in it is both cheap enough and profitable enough for someone to make electronic devices and sell them for 1p and then post them half way across the planet. You know, it’s an extruded aluminium body that’s anodised, reasonably well constructed electronics (no doubt full of cheap clone parts) and a set of headphones. You can’t buy headphones on eBay for 1p… you can’t buy a single resistor on eBay for 1p. You can’t buy bags of 1000 capacitors on eBay at a price that makes them 1p each.

Going off this, if Apple stopped making iPods and iPhones from expensive components, and stopped paying their workers we could have iPads for 20p off eBay.