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:Advantage?

[Latent IT]

I'd say that Apple definitely has the advantage here because:

1) The Ipod is smaller, lighter, and has a bigger screen.
2) The battery is a Lithium Polymer, which can support playback of up to 13 hours, by some user reports, while this hunk of junk may very well use AA's.
3) It costs, oddly enough, $10 more, even though Toshiba makes the hard disc, and it has *ahem* a smaller screen.
4) The backlight can't be nearly as good.
5) USB 2.0 can't power the unit, while firewire can, so I never have to bring an AC adaptor *anywhere*.

I think that you maybe didn't read the article?

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: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.

5GB HDD as floppy replacement?

[Huge Pi Removal]

Well... To change the topic slightly, look at it this way:

The Apple iPod can be split between music and data. So you could, in theory, put your absolute favourite music on it, and leave the rest of the space for a system folder (and some utilities).

Apples can boot from Firewire drives.

The new Apple XServe has, on the front, a FireWire port.

So any responsible sysadmin that has to look after an XServe _needs_ an iPod as an *ahem* emergency recovery disk.

Given that the Unix way is to have a "boot floppy" and a "fixit floppy", I'll go with Apple on this one :) Sounds like a "floppy replacement" to me!