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."

Comments

Removeable 5GB HDD

[jpaulson]

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.

Re:Not as bad as all that, Apple nuts

[spectecjr]

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

Re:Competition is good

[mblase]

Apple should put more concetration on open standards then making hardware that is incompatible for the reason "just because"

Apple's iPod hardware is entirely compatible. It's just a hard drive, with MP3 data stored in a particular sort of file tree. It's the software that Windows and Linux need to access it, and Apple hasn't bothered making that for the simple reason that they're not in the business of making PC products.

XPlay and EphPod both work, separately or together, to bridge the iPod/PC gap just as iTunes already does for Macs. And they do so with Apple's blessing, because Apple already knows that being able to sell iPods to PC users would be a good business decision -- but using iPods to help sell iBooks and iMacs is, from their end, an even better one.

Re:Still no Ogg...

[guttentag]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ogg seems to take significantly more processing power to decode. The media player manufacturers probably don't want to spend extra money to handle Ogg when 99% of the market just wants to play MP3s.

Re:It can't be any worse than the i-plod

[MaxVlast]

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.

Re:I've never understood the market for these play

[rarose]

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)

Re:I've never understood the market for these play

[rsborg]

So here's what I don't get...is the smaller profile of the device worth the extra $220?

Perhaps. Here are the reasons I can think of to justify the cost:

• Form factor, as you mentioned. No MP3CD players will fit in my shirt pocket (iPod), or even my pant pocket (this new Toshiba thingy)
• Hard drive == skip resistant. Okay, given that most of the MP3CD players these days are resistant enough, I still managed to buy one last year that wasn't (impossible to play on airplane).
• Convenience. iPod does it right, by charging the device as you download, and transfer time is miniscule. Also, the single unit, single connection is much less clutter than 10+CD's, a CD-burner, The MP3CD player, a case, the charger, etc. Besides, once you burn the CD's you must reburn to get what you want. And as Apple knows well, interface *does* matter
• Batteries. I hate em. Even rechargable NiMH AA's are a pain in the ass. AFAIK, no MP3CD player has a built-in battery pack.

So in short, I think it's just a bit more than profile.