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Having said that, since I don't like listening on headphones (gives me a headache), I find that there is little value in a portable music player that does not have enough space to contain your entire music library. In that situation (use only hooked up to car and/or home stereos) the constant need to swap songs out renders even an overpriced 512 MB SD card pretty pointless - the same can be achieved more conveniently with a handful of (much flatter than a Tungsten|T) CD-RW Audio CDs or less than one MP3 CD-RW with an appropriate CD player (which are cheap as dirt these days). Moreover, the loss of a CD-RW disc is inconsequential while the lose of a Tungsten T or even just an SD card would be quite distressing.

Better still, and what I do, plug your PowerBook into your car stereo's AUX input and control iTunes or what have you with Salling Clicker and a T68i or equivalent bluetooth phone. Talk about geek cool.... Further I'm considering acquiring an old G3 or G4 tower to mount in the trunk of my car - I envision automatic music syncing via an 802.11b connection with my home iMac jukebox when I get in range. Surely someone has done this already?

i dunno if you have a need for a multi-gigabyte audioplayer, but if you get yourself a palmpilot, such as the palm Tungsten|T you can get a program called aeroplayer for that which plays mp3 and ogg. the ogg part is free, but the mp3 ability expires after 14 days and costs ~US$20

compared to a standalone audioplayer, the Tungsten is rather pricy, but keep in mind its really designed as a PDA. besides, your average audioplayer doesn't have a 320x320 color screen.

for one of these for some time now. I would like to put it with wifi in the back of my car and run a custom (read: linux) mp3 server. Now all I need to tack down is the touch screen LCD interface for it (seriously).

I think a better (or at least more clever) option would be to use Bluetooth to connect a Palm to it, and use that as the display. Some models (like the Tungsten T) have Bluetooth built in, the displays on pretty much all of the recent Palms are more than readable in any light (and include a built-in digitizer), and when you take your Palm with you, nothing visible is left behind...good from a security standpoint.

(The Tungsten T has a pretty good MP3/Ogg player for it already, but you're limited to whatever music you can shoehorn into an SD card. By using a Palm (or maybe another handheld) as just a display, you could have access to however much music you can cram onto a hard drive.)

Palm OS 5 PDAs (Zire 71, Tungsten T) only have integer ARM CPU's, and they play Ogg files just fine (running AeroPlayer or PocketTunes). And the Apple iPod uses a very similar ARM CPU core.

The Palm Tungsten T works great as an MP3 and Ogg player with either of the shareware programs Aeroplayer or Pocket Tunes installed. Aeroplayer is free for ogg use, but not free for MP3. Pocket Tunes is not free for either. In any case both are pretty cheap. The TT uses standard MMC and SD cards. Not to mention that the Tungsten T is an excellent Palm OS 5 PDA.

How does that make the palm FASTER? I.e. when decoding videos or playing mp3:s.

Those aren't the primary functions of a PDA. You use it mainly to take notes, keep addresses, etc. The faster you can get in, look up an address, and shut down, the better. Keeping that info in memory instead of having to look it up in a file has to be at least a little faster.

(That said, AeroPlayer rocks. Somebody put up a (leaked) patch that fixes the Tungsten T audio problem; with the patch in place, AeroPlayer sounds as good as any other MP3 player. For you Ogg zealots, it supports that format too.)

XIP's in Pocket PC's now? Wow, I'm really out of the loop these days. Not that I'm surprised by that, mind you.

"Easier," on the other hand, is very subjective. These days, you don't actually *need* files to be in PDB format to be usable. Finally, that "design" that you're mentioning has been in place for years. The interface didn't really get locked in until Palm finally added SD slots, but it's not as rare as you seem to think. Whatever inefficiencies you've noticed simply haven't cropped up yet. Anyway, the main reason I picked the Clie was because it's the only line of OS 5 devices to support two slots. I'll readily admit that the Memory Stick is an inferior design, but just because 512MB cards aren't out now doesn't mean they'll never be released. It's just flash RAM.

As for your Axim, there's a good reason I left it out. Currently, it's undercutting every competitor on the market. You simply won't find a cheaper PPC with as many features without robbing a supply truck. I wouldn't be surprised if a deluge of dirt-cheap Axims finally gives MS the advantage, and hell, I'd consider getting one.

However, the Tungsten T (and probably the Clie NX-series in short order) can play Ogg files, thanks to Aerodrome Software, and now that the platform can probably handle DivX, I'm sure someone's about to write the player. From tooling about with an NX-70, I know that it can at least handle blitting the video, now it's just a matter of decoding. Quake and Doom, on the other hand, might take a while. I'm not bothered by this, but that's mostly because I go mad without a very specific keyboard and optical mouse combat in any FPS. That's a matter of opinion.

Yes, the Axim wins. Slap a PalmOS Emulator on it, and it still wins, and lets you treat it like a Palm (ideally.) Sure, one out of four isn't great for the Palm to try to compete, but they also *just* entered this end of the market. Prior to OS 5, the Palm platform was designed for working as a PDA, not as a full blown PC-like platform. I'd have to give it at least a year before assuming that it's even close to maturity.

The specs of this new gadget don't sound too different from the Tungsten T...they exchanged Bluetooth and the 5-way navigation pad for GPS and twice as much memory. It's likely to have the same audio problem, unless Palm is supplying Garmin with a fixed version of Palm OS.

After the Vorbis guys released the free integer Ogg codec, you no longer need to buy tkcPlayer to get mobile ogginess. The Linux standby XMMS and also Opie Player can play them on a Zaurus (and probably some Ipaqs too).

Even a higher-end Palm can run Vorbis software too.

2002-12-04 16:18:01 Ogg Player for Palm Tungsten T (articles,pilot) (rejected)

As reported by Palm InfoCenter, "A group calling themselves Aerodrome Software have released a public beta of an Ogg/Vorbis media player for the Palm Tunsgten T handheld. The player inititally supports only ogg/vorbis encoded files, a new open source audio format, but promises to have mp3 support in the near future."

I'm curious as to whether they used the integer-based "Tremor" code to achieve this.