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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."
You will be overwhelmed by "gadget craze" and forget that carrying an IDE drive around is cheaper. Poverty to follow.
...in bed.
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!
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."
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.
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.
Check it out.