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New MP3 Portables
An anonymous reader writes "This has been a busy week for the announcement of the latest crop of MP3 portables, probably just the start of many more with the holiday season only a few months away. First Samsung has announced their first jukebox model the Yepp YP-900, a 10GB unit using Toshiba's 1.8-inch drive for storage (same one as in the iPod) and eschewing FireWire (400 mbps) for a USB 2.0 (480 mbps) connection to transfer files. Mambo has also announced a jukebox player called the Digital Media-X PhotoBank Jukebox that is more akin to the Archos Jukebox Multimedia in that it can store and display photo files and possibly video files in the future. The Mambo holds 20GB of memory on a more common 2.5-inch hard drive, making it a heavier unit than the YP-900. Like the Yepp, the Mambo also goes with a USB 2.0 connection, heating up the competition between FireWire in digital music portables. The most interesting feature about the Yepp? It also has a MMC/SD card slot to facilitate trading tunes to and from other digital music players. (Take that SDMI). Finally SonicBlue has started shipping replacements for the Rio 600 and the Nike PSA[play 120 (made by Rio for gym workouts). Both the Rio S30S for the exercise-minded and the Rio S10 come with 64MB of memory and are upgradeable to 192MB through MMC flash cards. The S30S comes with an FM radio, while the base-optioned S10 is claiming 35 hours of running time on a single AA battery. Both players transfer files via USB 1.1's 12mbps port."
the ipod is the only mp3 player i have seen that made me go wow. everything else is a joke.
why is it no one has caught with apple yet? the ipod is great but there is room for improvement.
its like no one wishes to actually compete. they arent even copying apple like they usually do. they just aren't doing ANYTHING
Do any of these come with short range FM broadcast for easy coupling to your car stereo?
Looking at www.sonicblue.com and saw some more info on the players. Some facts that might interest a few.
Supports Microsoft Windows Media digital rights management
Upgradeable to future music formats
http://www.sonicblue.com/audio/rio/s30s.asp
The Yepp player uses the same drive as the iPod, so it could have exactly the same form factor and weight (specs weren't released, so this si speculation), and has the same capacity. And it transfers with USB 2.0, which is both faster than the iPod's FireWire, and is also more commonly available on the PC platform. So why is this "junk"? If anything its good competition.
Check out the new MiniDisc Recorders. They have the new NetMD technology, that lets you drag and drop mp3's to an MD at 32x real-time. And MDLP lets you record up to 320 minutes in stereo on a $1.50 disc. They have a USB port built into the unit. The Sony MZ-n505 Model is only $135, now that's a damn good deal.
There's nothing wrong with anything - Phillip J. Fry
What I wanted was a MP3 player that could be used under water. Those FM radios made for swimming have terrible tuning, specially when you dive a few inches (flip turn, for instance), and usually seek for another station when that happens. I understand the problems of doing a casette player for under water use (size, movable parts, water proof issues of openable containers), but a MP3 player seems perfect. That would be a sports friendly player.
Oh Apple, when will you do the right thing? The libraries for Ogg Vorbis decoding are released under the BSD license. They can be compiled via [either GCC or] ARM ADS and its free
GCC and the Tremor library (integer arithmetic Vorbis decoder) are free software, but ARM ADS software is hardly "free". It's proprietary and $6,000 per seat.
How hard is this for them? What I really think is the problem is that QuickTime and iTunes cannot deal with variable bit rate audio codecs, so playing them on Mac OS is a no-no.
Actually, the big problem is that the iPod player runs audio through a chip that takes MP3 audio on one pin and produces PCM audio on another. It's much harder to change hardware than software.
Oh, and USB2 connection? Sure you don't have to pay a buck to apple every time you sell a device, but the power has to be a separate plug.
Not necessarily. USB 2.0 devices can be bus-powered. Besides, you need batteries anyway for when the device is disconnected from the host computer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't understand why there are no popular Compact Flash-based or microdrive-based mp3 players?
Wouldn't a microdrive-based player be a *lot* smaller, weigh less and use less power - and thus be more versatile - than most of the other players with a capacity on the order of a gigabyte (and who wants more than 1GB - that's a heck of a lot of mp3s)? If 1,073,741,824 bytes isn't enough, just upgrade by putting a bigger drive in. If a miniature spinning disk is too unreliable, then just put a flash-based memory unit it. You could even plug in wireless card and play from a network!
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
- Apple overnights me a box
- I stick ipod in box
- I call to have the shipping company pick up box
- Apple sends me a brand new ipod, arrives 2 days later
That's what I call service, most of the other players I've seen have a very limited warranty and the companies are almost guaranteed to object to a replacement. Apple was amazing and they should be, with the recent release of the ipod for windows, they are bound to get a few converts if they keep that level of service.lets see USB is controlled by Intel, Firewire is controlled by IEEE, now which is more open, one or many.