e.Digital Promises Another iPod Competitor

joefefifo writes: "e.Digital has a press release describing their Odyssey 1000, supposedly due out in the fall. Some stats: Looks like an iPod, uses USB 2.0., has a 20GB capacity, built-in mic for voice recording and navigation, FM Tuner with 12 presets, Mac & PC compatible, iTunes compatible, runs e.Digital's MicroOS 2.0. Except for the choice of OS, looks pretty sweet. Any chance someone will get it to run Linux instead?" Like Toshiba's little player, it uses USB 2 rather than Firewire.

Comments

DRM support

[NiceGeek]

I don't care how cool it looks...I'm not supporting any device that has DRM support.

Archos Jukebox

[chaidawg]

Can anyone explain to me why people think there are no options for a PC based portable MP3 player? I have had the 20g Archos Jukebox for five months now and I couldn't be happier with it. Sure it only uses USB 1, but how often do you need to fill 20 gigs?

I put my 5 gigs of music on it overnight when I first bought it and spend a couple of minutes each week putting on my new music. All of that with 2 sets of rechargable 6 hour life batteris for $300. I will admit that the UI is not as pretty as on the iPod but for the price and size difference, I don't care.

If you want to take a look at one go to archos.com

When will somebody manufacture

[t0qer]

Just a simple box that I can plug my OWN hard drives into?

All I want, and please hear me out, is a pretty plastic box big enough to fit a laptop drive. Put a rechargable lithium ion battery in it. Some sort of LCD screen, Alphanumeric, TFT display, I don't care.

Keep the OS in a rom so I don't have to worry about storing it on the hard drive. Make sure there is enough OS to format the drive fat32.

And I want all this for about $100 bucks. I think that's fair. Why do I need to buy another laptop drive when I got so many sitting around?

Re: When will somebody manufacture

[pjrc]

Just a simple box that I can plug my OWN hard drives into?

Have you see my little open-source mp3 player circuit board project?? Yes, a shameless plug, but on-topic. I have the Neo guys also sell a box that you can plug your own drive into... or at least they did some time ago.

All I want, and please hear me out, is a pretty plastic box big enough to fit a laptop drive. Put a rechargable lithium ion battery in it. Some sort of LCD screen, Alphanumeric, TFT display, I don't care.

Saddly, there's nothing simple about pretty plastic boxes and li-ion batteries. Injection molding involved tooling costs in the range of $20k to $60k. Li-ion batteries are complex and take special circuits. They're only sold to a small number of companies who make custom battery packs (because the packs include critical safety circuits). High tooling setup fees also apply to Li-ion battery packs.

Keep the OS in a rom so I don't have to worry about storing it on the hard drive. Make sure there is enough OS to format the drive fat32.

Yep, did that. It's all GPL'd too, available from a CVS server, or on this firmware download page.

And I want all this for about $100 bucks. I think that's fair.

That would be fair, if you and millions of others were serious buyers.

But the do-it-yourself market is a niche, and the economy of scale associated with mass production just isn't possible. Still, I've tried to keep the costs low (and also keep it buildable for hobbists with hand soldering). By the time you add the LCD, it's at about twice the "fair" $100 mark. If you go price the parts alone (not even soldered together) at small quantity, you'll find you're well over $100. If you're Creative Labs or Apple building millions in China, you can make it that cheap, but a niche market as small volumes, it just isn't possible.

Anyway, later this year I'm planning to make a car stereo cd changer protocol emulator board, so this thing can emulate a cd changer (but with lots of discs with lots of files... depends on the limitations of each deck and its protocol).

USB? Ugh.

[__david__]

Why do all these companies think that USB 2.0 is ok? Has anyone ever benchmarked USB 2.0? It is sssssslllllooooowwww! [1] Some needs to smack these designers and make them put a REAL bus (like FireWire) on these devices. When you are talking about significant ammounts of data its very important that your bus be as fast as it can be. Sadly, USB 2.0 just doesn't cut it.

I've been waiting for some company to come out with an iPod competitor to drive the prices down, but no one is going to be able to compete (in my mind) until they make a FireWire version.

-David

[1] We've run many tests at our company with USB 2.0 and FireWire to ATA bridges, and without fail the USB 2.0 are (at best!) half the speed of FireWire. This is especially pathetic when you see that USB's max bandwidth is 480 Mbits, and FireWire is 400. I don't know if its inefficient protocols, crappy drivers, crappy host bus chips or crappy bridge chips but whatever it is USB 2.0 is substandard. Avoid it.