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Toshiba's iPod Competitor
a lonely moose writes: "It looks like Toshiba basically copied Apple's iPod. They got cheap on screen size and unit weight, and without iTunes, it'll be darn hard to handle as elegantly as the iPod. Anyway, check out
MacCentral's article and the smoking forum at the bottom."
I'd say that Toshiba definitely has the advantage here because:
1) They can buy the drives from themselves at cost
2) They support Windows users (officially)
I think that we can declare them the winner.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I not spending my hard earned dollars on any digital audio hardware until it supports Ogg Vorbis...
Removeable 5GB HDD, that fits in a card slot...
That has potential... I see many options... Most of them along the lines of a decent replacement for the floppy disk finally.
The player itself seems no different from a host of others.
-- Jason
Now hopefully this will create better faster cheaper iPods and also have them a bit more open so many platoforms can use it. For me the fact the iPod only works on a mac isnt an insentive to buy a Mac or and iPod. It would actually be a turn off for both. Apple should put more concetration on open standards then making hardware that is incompatible for the reason "just because"
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
get over it. toshiba didn't make this with the explicit intent that it would work with linux. it's a windows/intel compatible device that happens to also work with linux because most linux runs on intel hardware.
You've got 5GB of songs. An average 128-kbps MP3 file takes up, say, 5MB of space. That means you've got room for about a thousand songs on one drive. That's a thousand songs. Approximately the size of my entire music collection, including the ones I hate.
So, aside from swapping your entire music collection with a buddy -- why in the world would you care if you can take the drive out and replace it?
I dunno, I suppose being able to encode metadata, boot off the drive, retain permissions (another form of metadata), and a few other things, makes the argument for HFS+
Oh, and perhaps compatibility with over, what, 10 years of legacy might have helped too.
HFS+ is interoperable, it's just that Microsoft doesn't implement HFS+, so yeah it's a pain to pay someone $40 to implement HFS+ support for you, but then what do you think Apple users have to deal with when buying PC oriented products?
GPL Deconstructed
First, Toshiba isn't the first to sell an "iPod competitor". We've already seen the Treo 10 [com.com] ("...which is similar in appearance and function to the iPod...") and Nomad [nomadworld.com] hit the market, with similar press responses.
The amusing thing is, even though the press might compare the Nomad 3.0 with the iPod, the Nomad 3.0 was leaked on the Creative Nomad newsgroups about a year before the iPod was announced.
And all the specs were the same as when it was released.
The details of their Audigy stuff were released at the same time.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
If the average CD-RW can hold approximately 650 MB of data, that comes out to needing just under 8 CD-RW's to hold what the single 5GB disk holds. A decent portable CD/MP3 player can be had for around $150, and let's round up to a 10-pack of CD-RW's for $20, plus a carrying case for the CD-RW's for $10.
So here's what I don't get...is the smaller profile of the device worth the extra $220?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Please tell how, oh, how Linux was ripped off for OS X? Most of the ideas that are in OS X were released in 1988 with NEXTSTEP.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Add a more powerful CPU/ASIC, video out, firewire. Then you can load divx ;) movie rips or DV straight from your camcorder. Ignore copyright bits and you could swap movies just by plugging one device into another. Allow an optional color LCD screen of decent size so you can watch movies on the go.
Then you have a portable media library.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Could you define "better" with something more than Trillian. Everything I download has extra shit piled on. That's how they help recover their costs. In any case, there's no escaping bloat if you add or remove software from a windows machine every so often. You've never experienced "Windows Rot"?
As for the plethora of windows software...not that I want to get into the same old argument, but quality over quantity, dude. And there's this thing called the internet that lets you download all sorts of software without having to walk into a local computer store and pay tax/markup anyway.
I don't know the last time I bought shrink-wrapped software anyway...other than Quake3 for my Athlon.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
With a CD/MP3 player I still have to:
a) Carry around a big CD/MP3 player
b) Carry around those 8 CDs
c) Swap between those 8 CDs
d) Find the CD with the album I want listen to
e) Whenever I get a new album, burn a new CD that includes it.
With my iPod, I drop it in my pants pocket and I'm done. No fishing for CDs, no carrying cases, no saying "oh shit" when my CDs get scratched.
Absolutely worth it.
spreer
Yes.
I'm a BIOS developer and spend lots of long hours in a very noisy machine room hunched over prototype machines will all sorts of fan and other noise around... My iPod is small enough to drop in my shirt pocket which is a good thing because the amount of hanging cable to my ears is much shorter than a larger device on my belt (think about hazard getting caught in fans, etc).
Also the battery life (10 hours) is long enough that I can go all day on a major debug bender and not worry about my tunes dying right about the time I get to an interesting problem.
Also having multiple CD-RWs means I've got multiple CDs floating around the lab that I need to protect from scratches or from other people clipping, etc.
I may develop PC hardware, but I love my iPod (and yes... the iPod was enough for me to go out and buy a G4 PowerMac)
--Rob
There's one VERY important thing that nullifies the advantage the ipod gets. Apple doesn't have windows software for it. So, let's see here, Windows controls roughly 90% of the market. Apple controls maybe 3%. Now, let's say that all the apple customers buy an Ipod. Toshiba would only have to sell a player to 1 in every 30 PC owners to be matching apple's market share.
Apple's plan to release Ipod with only apple software initially may have made sense but it's going to kill them in the long run if they don't get off their high horse.
Also, add to this that the Toshiba has some features that make it, in my mind, superior to the ipod. The fact that it's hard drive is removable is a definite bonus. Not only can I speed up transfers by hooking it up to my laptop's pcmcia slot, I can also upgrade the thing later if I need more space.
We'll see when these devices finally come out, but it seems to me that overall these are similar enough to cut into apple's sales in the long term. If apple decides to stick to selling to a base of apple customers, then they will never sell as many Ipods as Toshibas take on it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
--apple progs made by apple are slick because they work, and because they are designed around hardware that is no compromise the best (or dang close to it).
That's the package quality apple buyers expect, and why you see the deal that is a cult following almost. Instead of BSOD, your machine just works. the progs work, etc. the paltry few bucks difference is neglible if you value your time.
It's been stated before, you can buy a general motors so-so car, or a mercedes that lasts decades and is a smooth ride. What's cheaper in the long run? What's your time worth? what's your "computing experience" worth? "Apple people" try to explain this to windows and unix people, and it necver comes across except as elitism, when in reality it's just enthusiasm, apple folks just want to share a "good experience" they have with others, but the others always seem to think they are being put down. Ity's too bad, too. Apple just plain doesn't want to make junk, either hard or soft. That's their "niche" market, slightly more expensive but MUCH better quality computers and software (on average, more or less). You pay for that, such is reality.
Perhaps. Here are the reasons I can think of to justify the cost:
So in short, I think it's just a bit more than profile.
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The parent to your post already gave two links to two products for bridging the iPod gap.
Apple's own website shows the bridge between ADC (their proprietary LCD solution) and DVI, the respected standard. Try http://www.apple.com/displays/adapter.html And that's not the only one, it just has Apple's blessing.
Now, why don't I tell you what *isn't* totally incompatible. A G4 tower. The kind that has a side that opens, many industry standard PCI cards, an industry standard AGP slot, industry standard SDRAM, industry standard ATA drives..
Or maybe you care to avoid their industry standard USB peripherals, like their stock keyboard/hub and mouse that works with Wintel hardware.
Or maybe you care about their documented hardware? The same hardware that you can boot Linux from.
Jeez guy, maybe you should get up off your high horse and realize that Apple is just selling very expensive hardware. Use any damn OS you want on it, but remember that you're also purchasing license to the Mac OS which includes a lot of good stuff, like iTunes, iMovie.. An OS that runs X11 and compiles like BSD. And if you don't like the cost, then complain about the cost and don't make crap up