New Philips eXpanium Will Use 3" CDs

SpunOne writes: "Phillips is gearing up to release their new eXpanium mp3 player. Unlike most players in the past that use proprietary storage technology, Phillips is turning to the use of those cute little 3 inch CDs that have been around forever, but never really used for much. Apparently most existing CD burners can already write to them, and the rest can do so with an adapter. Phillips even has a beta test available if you're interested in giving it a try." If you should get into the beta group (50 people), why not write up a report for us on this little device? If it only played .ogg files, I would try to pre-order from somewhere.

Comments

Why?

[DeadMeat (TM)]

I'm not sure exactly what advantage this has over other MP3 players, or even over non-MP3 players. Sure, it's small, but so are traditional MP3 players with flash media; plus they don't have the problems that CD players have (tons of moving parts, skipping, delicate laser, media easy to break, etc.), and they're getting close to the 180-something MB a 8 cm disk can store. The media may be a hell of a lot cheaper than flash, but at a 256 kbps encoding rate (IMHO the lowest you can go to get decent sound quality without losing bass or getting artifacts) we're only talking about 100 minutes of music . . . in which case if you're willing to put up with a traditional media-based player you might as well go with a MiniDisc and not worry about compression artifacts at all.

To me the advantage of CD-based MP3 players has always been that they can store massive amounts of music they can store -- 700 megs (or more if you get more expensive CDs and/or overburn) on a CD that costs pennies. Being able to pop a CD containing 5 to 10 CDs' worth of music into my Rio Volt is the main reason I bought it -- no lugging around more than a couple of CDs, and I can use it in the car without endangering other people on the road by flipping through CDs when I should be driving. By cutting the storage capacity to just over a quarter of that, it's sort of eliminating the point of using CDs. Iomega had the same problems with the HipZip -- no matter how cheap the media is, nobody's willing to put up with the problems brought on by optical or magnetic media unless they get some big storage payoff. (Admittedly, at 40MB the PocketZip disks are significantly smaller, but so are the disks' physical size, and you didn't have to invest in a CD burner if you didn't already own one.)

That isn't to say I don't wish Philips well with this -- my last (pre-MP3) CD player was a Philips, and it's taken quite a beating and still works as well as the day I bought it. I'm just afraid the market for this sort of thing isn't going to be very warm.

Picky, Picky ...

[overshoot]

That's Philips with one L -- the two-L version sells petroleum products. The Company is quite touchy on the subject.

I have some

[DNS-and-BIND]

I saw some 3" CD-R's at the electronics store, and I just had to have them, they were so cool-looking. They hold 180Mb, and five of them cost about the same as ten 5-1/4" CD-R's. A year later, they're still sitting there...I haven't found a use for them yet. They sure are neat, though.