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Treó 10: Another Portable Mass Storage Device
mblase writes: ""The Treó 10 is a lightweight, pocket-sized, digital music jukebox with the capacity to store over 3,000 songs - that's 150 hours of music." It's got twice the hard-drive space of Apple's iPod, but also half the RAM, half the battery life, and uses a much slower USB connection instead of FireWire. However, it's PC-compatible using MusicMatch Jukebox right out of the box, and costs only $250 instead of $400 for the iPod. CNet's article compares the two further."
How long will it be before handpring and these morons start dukeing it out over the 'so cool' term Treo? They are booth personal electronic devices, looks like trademark overlap to me
but IANAL.
Does this thing use USB, or USB 2.0? From what I understand, there's a HUGE speed difference.
That's an unreal number of songs. I went to a BBQ the other weekend and was surprised to find out this guy had over 2600 songs that he had downloaded between napster and morpheus. I have a measly 120! Does anyone see themselves loading this bad boy up with that much music? Is this just a waste?
So is there any legal overlap between the Treo that is a handheld PDA/phone (which could potentially end up with an mp3 attachment) and the Treo that is a handheld mp3 player? Ohhh, wait, I see. The former has an accent over the 'e' whereas the latter's is on the 'o'. As observed by JC's
Help fight continental drift.
in the just completed (rather dull) Fall COMDEX, i spoke to a number of people who had iPod's, they all loved them, BUT, about half of them were using them as portable storage, in addition to their MP3 duties....
/.r's come up with????
most popular use was transferring movies to your iPod for viewing through your (apple, obviously) notebook.....
at 10GB and 250$, this also becomes a good alternative for the Wintel crowd as a "Personal Storage Device"...
you could put a movie file, some MP3/WMA's, TeleTubbie Pr0n, etc on this, your backups of key programs, data, etc...
for the money this is a LOT cheaper (if slower -- til USB 2) then the 1394 external drives people (including me) have been buying and much more portable....
what other uses can
......
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
It is also usb which will take a wicked long time to fill up this 10gb monster. It would have been nice if the Treo went with firewire like the iPod which seems more appropriate for this kind of device.
Sony has a laptop they call the "Vaio." It uses currently available technology in order to create a laptop. Its better than other ones, but more expensive.
Nike makes shoes. They're better than others, but more expensive.
McDonalds makes hamburgers. They taste good, but the ones from Steak & Shake taste better. However, they are more expensive.
In a thriving industry with hundreds of products which have only a few distinguishing features, why is it worth mentioning one more?
Perhaps this breaks some ground that I'm not aware of. If anyone has any insight, enlighten me.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
...I bought an iPod and got to admit that after passing the feeling of spending too much for not much more, I love the iPod.
The not much more ends up making all the difference. Having a firewire drive I can carry with me and hot plug to my home machine and transfer music when I need it the most and the fastest I can before leaving home is just phenomenal.
Having twice as much of memory gives me 20 mins of skip free music. A must for this symphonies. The size and design are just too good. Hummm, I love the click of the wheel of the jog shuttle. The interface is also simple and so convenient and so easy to use.
Finally, the battery is a big winner: reloading the unit while connected to firewire, I never ran out of battery like I did all the time on a walkman or even a Rio.
And little people know about the fact that there is a flash eeprom that stores the firmware OS of the machine and Apple plans to release a fix for early bugs, better experience. The other units, er, you just have to buy the new model sorry.
I'll get the software that let's it connect to Windoz. Linux support is probably right at the corner when enough people will buy that device.
Two thumbs up and I am lucky enough to have it before Christmas.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
You're not going to "fill up that 10gb monster" every day, you know. With a hard drive that big, most users can fill it up once, update it occasionally, and forget it otherwise. USB is fine.
but it runs under windows, so let's all party!
Yeah, I don't see anything about it working on Mac or Linux either.
Sadly, the overhead of USB is quite dramatic, bulk packets are 64 bytes max size. Blasting the board with bulk transfers from an Athlon 650, I could get between 860kb and 1.0MB/s into it - depending on the data. Due to bit-stuffing every six bits (this guarantees that the receiver can synthesize the clock from the data stream), the data rate is not constant. In real life it is probably closer to 1MB/s, though.
Interestingly, similar experiments on a Mac showed dramatically worse performance, around 600kB/s. Our resident Mac guru says this is due to very poor implemention in the OS.
Off-topic note to engineers: The part's DMA is broken and the manufacturer doesn't seem to want to rev the die.
I just do the postin', not the moderatin'. If I knew what goes through _their_ heads I could make a zillion dollars.
I take exception at the term "Mac-friendly propaganda", though. I bought the product because I liked its specs. I like the product and I said so, and why. In the old days, that used to be considered "word of mouth" and could be good or bad. It could make or break a new movie, a new book, a new gadget or gizmo far more effectively than any amount of advertising or promotion could do.
Liking something isn't necessarily parroting the marketing hype any more than disliking something is Baseless Slander and Unfounded Scurrilousness.
Yeah, yeah...I'm wandering a bit afield of the original topic. Just wanted to burn off a karma point or two to try to clarify my position.
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