Slashdot Mirror
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."
The RIAA will probably try and stop it's production since it tends to do that with non-Apple MP3 software.
Music all of the time! and Everywhere!
When do they go on sale?
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...
This post doesn't really warrant being on the front page of slashdot really; there's already portable MP3 players with hard drives. It's no surprise that more would come out. Just because it looks slightly like the ipod doesn't mean it's any more special than another mp3 player. It's good that more of these are getting to market, but I see nothing revolutionary here, or news worthy for that matter.
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?
You will be overwhelmed by "gadget craze" and forget that carrying an IDE drive around is cheaper. Poverty to follow.
...in bed.
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.
Archos, http://www.archos.com, has been in the game for awhile now. They have a handy 20-gig Jukebox Studio 20 MP3 Player & Hard Drive, http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_500205.h tml, that dare I say rocks. Still uses USB, but it nice to not only carry your MP3 collection around, but also have a handy transport for all your big files.
I have the Jukebox 6000 now, but I am hoping that St. Nick will remember my letter and hook me up with a Studio.
/sig "Shop smart! Shop S-Mart!"
It seems like this is the first in many similar products that will be on the market. This is from here
-- The Company demonstrated OEM licensee Musical ElectronicsLtd.'s e.Digital-powered jukebox product scheduled to bebranded by one of Musical's OEM customers for sale through Circuit City and other retailers. This product will allow users to encode music files directly from a CD player, bypassing the need for a PC to perform digital compression.
-- The hard-disk-drive (HDD) based music player product from OEM licensee EASTECH was demonstrated, and is slated for OEM branding.
-- The Company demonstrated Maycom's MP2000 Internet music player, based on e.Digital's technology and reference design. The MP2000 product is scheduled to be sold on e.Digital's online store in time for the holidays.
-- The Company announced that licensee Bang & Olufsen is readying product based on e.Digital technology for sale in their retail outlets worldwide.
________________
All my sig are fjdklafjkldafjkldafdaklf
I ordered an iPod the day Apple announced it. So far since its arrival, I've taken it halfway across country patched into my car stereo, I've taken it hiking in the Jemez Mountains, I've tuned out all the banal MallMusik to get my Christmas shopping done without killing anyone, and I patch it into the ministereo in my bedroom so I can be lulled gently to sleep by whatever the randomizer kicks out.
Oh, and I've got all my important OS X data backed up onto it.
I'm completely sold on the iPod. This thing for me is to music what my TiVo is to TV: you'd have to kill me to get it outta my meaty paws.
Now, for the Treo. USB? 10GB? Are they high? Syncing a portable to (in my case) a slightly less portable shouldn't ever be something that takes an overnighter plus to accomplish. That alone would kill the Treo for me.
I'm guessing from the fact that special "music management" software is provided that there's some kind of DRM scheme involved. I like Apple's approach: every iPod comes in a plastic sleeve with "Don't steal music" on it. My machine. My ethical conundrum. They stayed out of it, as they should have.
Still, it'll be nice to get some feedback from folks who've actually used one -- I'm especially curious about the DRM speculation.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
What is special here? Why is this notable at all? I don't really follow the comparison to the iPod. As noted, it has half the battery life, a USB connection, is larger, and is missing all the great Apple industrial design. The only thing that I have seen in this article is the comparison to the Handspring Treo name, and maybe the form factor.
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...
Another problem is that the bitrate can be dramatically different among the songs in someone's collection, ranging from 128kbps for some songs to a maximum 320kbps for others; yet these announcements completely ignore this! Are they afraid to tell us exactly how many MB or GB the device actually has? Or do they just seek to try and do simple math for us based on some predetermined 'common' bitrate?
I want real measurements, not arbitrary ones. I don't buy cars that get "three full drives per every tank of gas", and I don't buy music players that hold "xxx minutes of music".
-Angron
makes sense to me. Products that are worse and cost more don't survive.
Battery life matter much to me, so I use my Minidisc (40 hrs aa per charge). Those these units definetly have there plusses.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/gadgets/57a3.shtmlT he Terapin Mine Handheld
Uses ETHERNET and USB, runs linux and has 10 gigs of storage plus audio out and MP3 playing abilities. Now, why would you want a stinkin' ipod?
Photos.
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!
Neither the article nor the product web site have info on it, so I'll ask here: does the Treo have SDMI on it?
If so, its instantly worthless.
...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.
It seems that each new device along these lines gets a vapor-ware article, a "delayed release" article, a release article, two or three "Tom's Hardware compares..." articles, plus a human interest story or two.
... did we really need to see another one?
Honestly, cool hardware is great. (I was drooling over those HP Blade servers for almost half an hour!) But there are zillions of personal, portable MP3 players out there
wow! bigger AND slower!
but it runs under windows, so let's all party!
*sigh*
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Looks like it's got half the interface & looks to me as well. Kinda like buying a Yugo and comparing it to a Mercedes. Not to mention that and taking 10 hours to download your music rather than the 12 minutes on an iPod.
I just got my iPod on Thursday, and it's been a trip. Before I leave to work, I drag & drop the albums I think I want today (from my 80G archive), then I just drag around the iPod in the car, in my cubicle at work, walking around, etc.
If it wasn't for the fact that I can replace all my music in a matter of minutes, the iPod would have died a miserable premature death.
That and having it recharge batteries from the firewire port is pretty slick, though I haven't run out yet.
with the capacity to store over 3,000 songs - that's 150 hours of music
First, thank you for the story. But I'm going to plead to audio-device story submitters now: For god's sake, when posting the story to Slashdot, please talk to your fellow geeks in geek-speak, not copy-and-pasted condescending marketing terms. I can get that from CNET or MSN or my local news anchor. 3,000 songs? 150 hours? Based on what bitrate? How big is this compared to a PC hard drive? Will this store my existing collection that takes N gigs? Obviously, we can find the real specs if we hit the company's website, but do us a favor and give us the geeky bits when submitting the story.
FWIW, this Treo has a 10 gig drive, so I guess the 3,000 song figure is based on approx 3.3 megs per song. (Kind of low, really.) The 150 hour figure is apparently based on something between 128 and 160 kbps.
Okay, end of rant. Cool device.
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.
Who the fuck needs to be able to boot from a god damn MP3 player?!
This is a completely ridiculous feature...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There have been other Treos in the past as well. Treo, with a long vowel mark over the "e," as Handspring uses it, was trademarked at one time for use as a pesticide, although that mark is no longer active. And, in the 1960s, Treo was trademarked as the name for "soap impregnated in paper tissues for general household cleaning purposes."
errr, thanks C|Net. that's what i go to your site to learn about. expired trademarks in the fields of pesticides and women's shoes.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
See first hand this woman's opinion of the Good Morning, America TV program. I think most /. readers will find her reasons difficult to dismiss.
Why bother.
There's a bit more to it then just har hard drive, you know. For one thing these come with a 2.5'' inch drive rather then a 3.5'' drive. A standard size HD is a bit large for me to carry around.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
10GB=8.589935e+10 bits (assuming they're using 1024MB/GB not 100 to inflate the numbers). USB=12mbps=1.258291e+07bits/sec. Assuming this device completely saturates the USB port (it won't), that will take (8.59e+10)/(1.26e+07)=6826.668 seconds=1.89 hours. That seems like a long time to me. the iPod downloads its 5 gigs (yes, only 5, not 10) in ten minutes or so. Yeah, it's $150 more, but that's a big time difference
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
...Handspring's Treo. (The logo even has a flat line over the 'e' indicating a long 'e' sound.)
I'm sure lawyers will not be involved in this.
"And like that
I'm not that bright, however. I'm still suffering with LAME and NotLame notcompiles and I don't know how to write to my CD player with Linux. Because of that, I don't consider any of these things "PC" compatible. They are M$ compatible, the best example of overpriced hype that won't be here ten years from now.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Steve Jobs doesn't really jump up and down, he more of smirks. Don't get your Steve's confused: http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html
First I'll tell you guys the positives as I see them. The cost is a major factor. Like many people I can't drop more than maybe $50 at the drop of a hat, so the lower the price the better. The fact that for the lower price, you get 2x the storage is great also. The Treo is 2.5 cents per meg, while the iPod is 8 cents. That plus the fact that it works with Windows out of the box will probably give it very good sales. This is also good because USB is quite ubiqutous, unlike FireWire. The last good point that I'd like to touch on is the fact that it only has enough memory for 8 minutes of continuous playback. I have to say that I can't think of any way to use a MP3 player that would be so abusive that it would not be able to read a few megs off of a hard drive every few minutes. Are people planning on settings their MP3 players on those paint mixer things at hardware stores that shake paint cans like mad? Also, it's a serious bonus not to have to buy a Mac or some piece of software to be able to use my new MP3 player; of course if you already have a Mac, that's not a problem.
Now the cons, once again as I see them. Firs the iPod is tiny and has a great UI. The jog dial works extreemly well, and with the exception that it took me a few seconds to figure out how to force it to turn off (hold pause, didn't take long ;), the controlls are perfect and obvious. I think that while USB is good, they should have included USB 2.0 for a number of reasons:
- USB 2.0 is backwards compatible, so as more computers get USB 2, more people will get faster transfer rates. Let's face it, transfering 10 gigs at USB 1.x speeds would be mind-numbingly slow
- FireWire is just too rare (in the wintel arena anyway) to be able to ship and expect good sales without bundeling a FireWire card with the product, IMHO
- USB 2.0 is supposed to be faster than FireWire (or at least the current implementation of FireWire as seen on a Mac I could go out and buy today, correct?), so if USB 2 was availible you could transfer files to the Treo faster than the iPod
The computer interface isn't the only problem that I see. First of all the Treo looks physically bigger than an iPod. I understand that it would have to be a tad bigger to hold twice as much storage, but it looks quite a bit wider, which is my complaint. The interface doesn't look nearly as good as the iPod. I don't think that the buttons could beat that slick jog dial. Now if they were to include (at least as an option) a little LCD/remote on a headphone cable like many CD players have these days, something that I think should have been offered on the iPod, that could make up for it easy. The battery life is another problem. If all your songs were encoded at 128kbps, then the Treo should only be able to play about 3.5% of it's capacity without having to recharge. While the iPod holds less, it will let you play 12% of it's capacity without having to recharge. This seems quite significant to me. The last major issue that I can say without haveing used a Treo is that it just doesn't look as cool as the iPod. If there is anything that the iMac taught us (other than how much the industry loves playing "Me too!" with ideas that become annoying fast and last TOO long), it's that sex sells. Let's face it, the average joe prefers something that looks stylish (the iMac) to something that looks like a box (average no-name PC of years ago).Well, those are my thoughts. I'd love to do a better in-depth comparison, so you guys feel free to send me any MP3 player (or anything else ;) that you want. My e-mail address is above! All in all I must say that for me, there is no contest that I would have to go with the iPod.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Am I the only person that thinks Music Match sucks? (From freeware experience and my RCA Lyra...don't get me STARTED on the Lyra.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
No "Buy one now at ThinkGeek" link? You guys are slipping.
sulli
RTFJ.
About a month after the one year warranty period, my Vaio's plastic case cracked in one corner. Not too big a deal as everything is still working, just annoying to look at. Another couple months later and a small subset of the keys on the keyboard stop responding. Okay, got on Sony's factory support and ordered a new plastic plate and keyboard (at a cost of $250 total or so).
Works great for another couple months, then one of the hinges for the display snaps clean off. Bleh! At this point, I wish I had just bought a new Thinkpad when my keyboard broke instead of sinking more money into repairing my stinkin Vaio.
You left off the part about the lack of the Apple logo which always seems to increase the price of hardware.
Carrying both? Priceless...
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
and uses a much slower USB connection instead of FireWire.
USB 1.x can pump 1.2 megabytes per second (12 megabits, divided by 10 bits per byte counting comms overhead). That's the same as an 8x CD-ROM, or 50x realtime for a 192 kbps MP3. That's only five or six seconds per song. How is this slow for incrementally changing what's on your device when you get a new CD? Can't you spare one minute to copy the new album that you picked up at Best Buy to the device?
USB 2.x, on the other hand, is about as fast as a FireWire brand IEEE-1394 connection.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The nomad 20 GB is $349, less the twice the price for more than TWICE the storage....The only thing is it takes 2 bloody hours to fill up my 6GB nomad via USB so this thing is gonna be a nightmare...Apple has it right with FireWire...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
yeah, but can you play breakout on it? Well, can ya? :)
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
Well if you have a really customized OS you can just toss it on the iPod and take it to any Mac and be right at home.
Especially useful for those at college who hate how some Mac labs may be locked down with software. Again, just plug in and boot your own setup.
Also - it's not like this feature was in the requirements doc for the iPod. It's just an added bonus of Firewire.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
15 hours to load up via USB is a joke. These things have been in development, and they are trying to sell as many as they can before the axe falls...which will be very soon. FireWire is the way.
Is this the new unit of storage measurement? Will we soon see 50 megasong drives from Seagate? What if songs start getting longer again?
My 5200/75LC was the suckiest piece of suck ever created. And OS X 10.0 was pretty god-awful too. I still use Macs.
The fact that is has 10GB of storage isn't the disadvantage. The fact that transferring files to/from it would take probably 20x longer than to an iPod is.
Firewire is standard on all Macs and Sony Vaios, and is available on one or more models from several other PC manufacturers.
How many users out there have a machine with USB 2?
Read the blurb, that's all the comparison is. What a waste of bytes; the submitter summed up in 3 lines what it took the whole page on CNet.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Its taking me 8 hours+ to transfer 10.5gb of mp3s over a 10BaseT link to my machine at work. Screw you and die :(
-dk
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.
Geez people. 10 gig Treo??? 6 gig IPod???? Please people. Are you kidding me???? Get the freakin Archos 20 gig for only $330 at www.thinkgeek.com right now! Don't complain that it's only USB either. Yes USB is quite a bit slower than Firewire but please, it's not like your gonna suddenly decide to copy 10 gigs of music to your Archos all the sudden. I can't believe some people would actually sacrifice 300% more space just so the transfer speeds are faster.....IPod = dumb. 6 gigs is chunk change. And it's more expensive??!?? ha! My archos ownz the Ipod. Who cares how fast I can copy my 10 songs to my mp3 players. As long as it's not forever :)
Jakobud
If I were to have continued to purchase music, with the money I have these days, I'd be well over 10,000 songs. And I'm damn picky in terms of what I like. If 3,000 songs seems like a lot, you have very, very select tastes in music, or not much money.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Jesus h christ have some fucking respect for the people you work with. You brought the whole network to a crawl for what ??? Don't they have IDS where you work I mean fuck I hate people that do that. Burn the damn things to cds and get a cd wallet. Do not put a damn mp3 on the machine so people like me can get reemed because some fuck is serving mp3/divx and porn with windows file sharing. This is not a frigging bazaar for you to hawk your stolen mp3s omg I'm ranting sorry.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The point is, I have some 60GB of MP3s on my machines...and increasing as I slowwwwly get my CDs ripped. No, I don't completely replace all the music on the iPod every time I sync it -- but I could, and it would take less time than a single trip through my .newsrc. USB types don't have that luxury.
Something I found amusing about Apple's promotional material for the iPod was the way they gushed that it would hold 100 CDs -- your Entire! Collection! Chyeah...I'm at a shade under 700 and counting. And I don't think I'm _that_ unusual with music.
As for whether we're the exceptions, I don't think we are. The people who only own a few CDs aren't going to buy a gizmo like this: they're going to take the wallet o' CDs and their DiscMan(tm)(c)(r)(pat pend) when they go out.
Now, you can call kvetching about USB a "whine" if you like, but if you could transfer data at 400 Mb/s with one connector and 12Mb/s with another -- why on earth would you tolerate the dog-slow version?
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Check it out.
I dunno, something that has twice the storage for half the price (well almost)
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.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Why?
A) the Terapin is larger than an iPod
2) it's more expensive than an iPod
III) It's uglier than an iPod
d) It's got no Mac support, unlike an iPod
Admittedly, it's got some extra nifty cool features, but how many mp3 players do you need that have video out or PCMCIA slots? And to think, it's been marked down to just $130 MORE than an iPod...
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Notice the corelation? Silly design move. If they had more ram (so cheap right now too) it wouldn't have to access the HDD as often. Thus, the battery would last longer. Oh well...
SSL Certificate
stuff like:
Started CDRW Application
Reading Track x: nKB Left
Writing Track x...
NO INTERVENTION
NO MEDIA PRESENT
MEDIA NOT BLANK
ERROR WRITING TRACK
ERROR READING TRACK
ERROR CLOSING SESSION
and a few model numbers of cdrw mechanisms from Teac and Plextor. Have been trying to get iPod to recognize a drive (wrong mech., but) plugged directly with no positive results. Would appreciate any advice or help in digging deeper into the firmware, identifying if these strings are just leftover remnants or if application still present.
The iPod Updater 1.0 was pulled by Apple (hmm?) but is available elsewhere.
hacks@TAKETHISOUT.ipoding.com
Until I can get reasonable battery life, I'm using my trusty Walkman. The sound quality sucks, yes, but if you're on a plane / on a train / in a car the noise from that tends to drown out the tape hiss.
"The good die first." "Most of us are morally ambiguous, which explains our random dying patterns." --- MST3K
Arrgh don't remind me of those accursed things! At my high school those things were all we had in the labs. Even the late-model 225 MHz ones* seemed terribly slow running Netscape to the 486/33 I had at home. And that was even taking into account the far better net connection at school!
*-I don't believe those were actually sold at retail, they were only available to gullible school districts.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
I love their claims that this way I can "literally" put my whole mp3 collection in my pocket. I have roughly a 100 GB of mp3 files... so would I need to buy 10 of these things and then some massively over-pocketed cargo pants? Or does this thing come with those as features too?
--- http://foo.ca
Perhaps I am the odd man out, but I find that the iPod's ability to sync an entire music library, as well as play lists, between portable device and desktop/laptop is just as much a 'breakthrough' as 10 hours of battery life on a device so small and light.
I would like to know if this new device offers some synchronization scheme or is the poor user doomed to dealing with 10 GB of long file names to figure out if their entire music library was coming with them on a trip. (God be with them if they decided to wipe the 10GB drive and copy their entire collection over from scratch just to be sure - how long would that take over USB?)
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Just grap a 6Gb NJB, and slip a 40Gb disk in it.
Game Over.
To say that, the NJB is very nice, but its getting old now, and its replacement is due very soon. It makes me wonder why this crap Treo player made it onto slashdot, maybe 2-3 years ago it might have been news, now its just old kit.
F
...and it's Windows compatible! Yeeess! Three for three! Once again a superior device is released that reveals an Apple device to be the glitzy, overpriced chunk of geek-toy crap it really is.
While I don't have the extra cash to go out and pick up an iPod I've got to play with a couple of them. They are pretty fucking cool. The screen isn't some POS ordered out of a RadioShack catalog, the battery life is long because they don't use standard batteries, and they are really compact. They're geared toward Mac users and people pissed off that they only work with iTunes don't seem to grasp that most shit is ONLY Windows compatible and most of the time Mac users are SOL when it comes to new toys. As for a new iPod-ish device coming out with more space yet less actual capability that doesn't mean much. Storage space on portables isn't such a big deal since there's no way you could listen to the thousands of songs you can carry on the battery supply you've got available. However you might want to make your portable your main MP3 storage device in which case you're actually limited by space but also connection speed. USB is not going to cut it for this sort of task. Having 10GB would be a plus but the fact it would take you forever to fill up the drive is a definite minus. Now if this thing had the same capabilities as an iPod with a groovy screen for half as much money I'd be impressed. You get what you pay for though. Ask Nomad owners who bought their deck six months ago and are STILL waiting for their MP3 collection to upload to it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
A portable device for storing mass?
Isn't that called a box?
- OMG, 10 Mbps is even less than the 12 Mbps of (theoretical) USB peak bandwidth!
- OMG, 10 Mbps is 1/40:th of the (again, theoretical) FireWire/IEEE1394/i.Link peak bandwidth of 400 Mbps!!
Taken together, these two facts might make you think that ThinkGeek's device, while possibly cool, does not beat the iPod when it comes to bandwidth, and in fact doesn't even beat the Treo. Clear? With that said, I must say the TV output is kind of a cool feature.main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
I think that we can safely say that when they do collide they will stitch up some deal which results in the consumer being screwed over.
BTW, does anyone know if you can buy a portable OGG player yet? Perhaps someone could come up with a firmware patch for one of these things which would add that feature.
Sony Vaios and an increasing number of other laptops (Dells) have IEEE 1394 aka FireWire ports *but* they are 4 pin ports unlike Apple laptops' and iPod 6 pin ports. You need the 6 pin port for the iPod's cool feature of being able to recharge through FireWire. Plus, the FireWire cable doubles as the cable to connect to the iPod's wall wart when you want to use that! How cool is that?
So those laptops could have the fast transfer but not the recharge. And if an mp3 player *does* come with USB2, will it be able to recharge over that connection? I know USB can carry power but I don't think it's spec'ed to carry enough to do a recharge in a reasonable amount of time.
It seems a lot of people overlook this extra feature of FireWire. It's less of an issue for geeks but for most people, anything which means one less wire on their desk, one less wall wart, is a good thing.
Is a jukebox that has ethernet, and uses something like smb, or tftp to put stuff on/delete from it. I'd like the artist/album/song data to simply come from the filenames (ie, directory structure). Nothing else. Just a KISS mp3 player that is easy to put stuff on, remove stuff from, and organize.
I picked up a MP3 jukebox called the Roopaq a week ago. It doesn't come with a disk drive so I bought a 30G fujitsu drive. It uses USB to connect to the system, which manages a decent sustained 1M/second download. The main problem is that the battery life is only a couple of hours. I am currently looking for a larger battery as it seems to use a commodity Li-Ion module.
Now I have to get over the second "problem", I only have 5G left on it. Ahh the mp3 freedom of hundreds of CDs worth of music. (now if I can just get my unix server to correctly recognixe the drive format I'll be a happy camper...)
(Oh yeah.. cost $275 including $140 for the drive)
If I had a Mac, then, I would get an iPod. Unfortunately, I own a PC that lacks firewire. USB is a lot better for me than the *other* alternatives that my PC gives me. Can you imagine doing this over a standard serial connction? *shudder* VA
I won't be happy until it can hold 8000 songs. That's the size of my current mp3 collections (all live recordings and my encoded CD collections.) I've stayed away from hard-drive based systems because I can't see constantly copying music to them. Of course, it's probably just as tedious to keep making new CD-RWs.
Beg Pardon??? Sure USB is more ubiquitous and that is a very good reason to choose to make a product based on it. But you should have stopped while you were ahead.
That "expensive" license was only there for the first six months after Apple introduced Macs' with FireWire. After that, they dropped the price, check it out do a google search.
Apple makes kick ass hardware, but also makes some stupid moves, but that wasn't one of them.
---
"Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that."
People who are saying that the larger size of the drives doesn't matter if the battery life is shorter are missing the point. Even if you can only listen to 5 hours of music at a time, the power of having 300 hours of music at your fingertips is incredible.
It's not just, "I'm going to listen to 300 hours of music." It's, "I'm going to listen to 5 hours of music, and I can choose so many options."
While it's interesting to think about how long it takes to fill 10 gig via USB (short answer: overnight) that really isn't a big deal to me. Fine, I transfer your music one evening & I have it from then on on the Treo. There are two bigger 'time' questions though, IMO.
.02 worth.
1) How long does it take to start playing from the moment I boot the machine (for reference, Creative Nomad Jukebox's take up to 50 seconds for an initial boot, check out News.Creative.Com - Products.Nomad and the comments there by Nomad owners & you'll see this is a common issue)?
2) How long does it take for the Treo to shuffle from one track to another one? In other words, are there noticable delays between non-sequential tracks as the hard drive searches for the next song? This would also come into play if I searched for a song - how long will it take to find it?
Anyway, I can live with a long process of transfering my music to the machine as it will only have to be done once (with periodic smaller updates as I get new music), but the other issues would affect me every time I try to play music...and would just be annoying.
Just my
-Mark
Actually, what would be cooler is a wireless link like my Lucent 802.3 card. Those ought to get pretty cheap soon. Then you could be downloading into your MP3 player as you were walking out the door with it.
So much people complaining about the sync speed.. "takes n hours to fill 10Gb", etc..
But that's just the first time you fill it.
Other syncs will be much faster, because just the new (and modified) songs have to be copied, just like on a incremental backup.
Of course, assuming that the software is not dumb..
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
> I still can't understand why anyone would invest 15 hours in loading a USB device....
I have invested at least this much time, I guess, because I have about 20GB of songs on my upgraded 30 GB Archos. The thing is that I only invested maybe five minutes at a time, over a period of about 4 months. The reason I hacked it up to 30GB was so that it would be a download-once operation - I don't need to constantly shuffle what is on the toy because it has *everything*. My entire CD collection, plus what I have managed to pirate off of friends.
I have a bit over 500 myself. Don't think that is too unusual.
Plus I have 700+ albums from back in the day before these new-fangled CD things. But I was in radio back then. (And basically one of the guys from _High Fidelity_ but I have reformed since.)
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Got a spare slot? Firewire cards can be found for about 30$US.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Not a hack. As long as your machine will boot of off 1394, then it works.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
So when did "Made in the USA" become a feature?
No, it's different. What sucks about USB is that it does everything that IEEE 1394 does, but a little worse.
And the cost per unit of USB hardware is much cheaper than that of 1394 hardware. The asymptotic law of hardware cost states that if you reduce the cost of one component or set of components that contributes say 3/4 of the cost of a device, you can't reduce the total cost lower than 1/4 of the original cost. USB and USB 2 are both licensed on a royalty-free relevant-patent-swap basis; 1394 requires payment of a 25c per device royalty. After three layers of markup (manufacturer, distributor, and dealer), this royalty can become significant.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes, I know about the 1.8 inch drives in the smaller storage widgets, including the iPod. I mention in my review that the whole iPod actually costs about the same as the higher retail prices for a drive like the one it contains :-).
My 5200/75LC was the suckiest piece of suck ever created.
They're not always all that bad. Check out the HOWTO I wrote on making one useful.
--saint