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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."
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.
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.
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
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...
the other is tee - ar - ee - 'oh with an accent.'
both are registered with upto, 'parently.
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
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.
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."
I'm betting that whatever method it uses to transfer files from the computer isn't nearly as slick as the iPod's iTunes syncing.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
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.
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.
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
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.
No "Buy one now at ThinkGeek" link? You guys are slipping.
sulli
RTFJ.
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 ?
You're off by an order of magnitude or so. USB 1.x is 12Mbps, USB 2.0 is 480Mbps.
Check it out.
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.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.