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."

Comments

Re:Not Just Your MP3 Player

[znu]

Can you boot from it? Newer Macs can boot off of an iPod, which means you can install OS X on it, sit down at any Mac made in the last couple of years, hook it up, reboot, and have your setup up and running in around a minute.

I guess it doesn't matter with the Treo; it would probably be too painfully slow to run a system off of a USB drive anyway.

Re:nothing special here

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, Music Match sucks. The only good thing about Music Match is that it is fairly easy to use, which is why I used to use it. Here are some of my complaints about Music Match:

• 
  It is buggy as hell. The super high quality setting (in advanced recording options) actually creates terrible quality mp3s. See Analysis link of http://www.r3mix.net for more info. I encoded several CDs before I realized this. Boy was I pissed. I then switched to EAC and Lame (which produces better quality mp3s anyway). The people at Music Match apparently care more about adding lots of skins/gizmos/useless features, rather than making software that actually works.
  
• 
  It will nag and nag you until you make it the default media player for all the file types it supports. Very annoying.
  
• 
  The unregistered version is crippled anyway (rips and encodes slow, must register to speed up). Also displays annoying pop-up windows when exiting.
  

Re:What is it with that name

[Anonymous DWord]

Man's laughter is funny, manslaughter is not.

More Similar announcements.

[freeweed]

AMD released a new chip today that runs 5% faster than their old chips. It sells for 2x the price of the next fastest chip.

I dunno, something that has twice the storage for half the price (well almost) ... works out to be 4x the deal by my math (if these are the stats you care about, like I do). Compared to the much-touted ipod, I'd say this is one hell of an accomplishment.

Let's see regular 4x performance increased in CPU power for the same cost, and then I may agree with you. Until then, your point makes little sense.

Re:USB may be slower but isn't all that slow

[omega9]

[Read the whole thing before you mod me Offtopic.]

Burning CDs, just like pretty much everything else, requires overhead. The pipe might be technically big enough to move that ammount of data but you still have to consider that error checking, device I/O, and other things have bandwidth needs as well. Similarly, your new ATA100 hard drive will never be able to move files at peak speed because of the overhead related to it.

It doesn't "suck", it's just the way it is. USB was not invented as a means specifically for CD-RWs. Notice that the U stands for Universal. Manufacturers just realized that there may be some people that would be willing to trade speed for USB's ease of use. Saying it sucks is like bitching that you can't burn at 24X over COM1. A comparative list of speeds can be found here if you're interested.

Back on topic: This is where the iPod has everthing else out there beat hands down. Even this new Treo has some nice features but it's still USB. But does it really matter? Yes, when you first load it it'll be a pain in the arse, but after you've cleared that hurdle I don't believe you'll be sitting for hours waiting to update it. A CD with ~12 songs encoded at 128k takes up ~40M. USB tops out at 1.5MB/s. Including the afformentioned overhead, you're still only looking at 1 minute per CD. Why is it we all act like we're so important that we can't wait that long?

Agreed, it is sexy that the iPod can move files like lightning, but how long do you think it will be untill someone wises up and makes a firewire MP3 player for PCs?