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Another iPod Competitor
rael9real writes "NOMAD has intoduced a new player. It has USB 2 and FireWire (finally), and supports WMA and MP3. It has a 20GB drive like the high-end iPod, and supposedly holds more music because it supports WMA (though why someone would want to use WMA is beyond me). It *is* cheaper than the iPod, though. Looks like a definite competitor. Maybe it'll drive iPod pricing down." Update: 10/14 21:21 GMT by T : Note that the listed specs for the player mention only "USB," not USB 2.
Will it support Ogg Vorbis?
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
...part of the fun is doing other stuff with it and the community/culture of hacking it to do other stuff besides just play MP3 files. How much fun will the Nomad provide, and will it be able to generate the same sort of interest?
And oh yeah...what about ogg? (sheesh)
guac-foo
Lots of petrified grits
I would buy this as soon as possible if it played OGG. I suppose we need to make it clear to the manufacturers that OGG support would be beneficial to sales.
Perhaps we just need to give OGG time to become more pervasive.
It's worth pointing out that, if you're just ripping your own CDs, WMA isn't a *terrible* format. It's reasonable size, reasonable quality. It can't compare to a quality ten ogg vorbis file, but then again I don't believe it's meant to. For portable devices, it almost makes sense - except, of course, for the lack of linux support. And if you want to do anything involving sharing music and putting it on your player, than of course the WMA DRM features can be - but aren't always - a problem.
I'm the stranger...posting to
I recently bought a ipod (windows 20gb version) after years of using minidiscs. All i can say is they rule. 1 hour charge time to 80%, firewire connectivity, ability to jsut use it as a external harddisk, the interface rocks. And above all they look sweet as well.
Any competitor is going to have to do a lot to beat Apples domination of the market.
If they do bring the ipods price down, it wont be a bad thing. Yes ill probably feel resentful cause i paid more, but what the hell. The morepeople that have iPods the better.
Oh and if you have a Windows Ipod, dont use the enclosed software, use Ephpod, a fantastic bit of free software which is so much better than Apples bundled Music Match Jukebox.
The reason iPod is such a great product is because it integrates perfectly with iTunes. Not only does the hardware interface become a pleasure to use but the software-hardware interface is seamless as well. The real question here is how well thought out is Creative PlayCenter 3. Assuming that Creative made the hardware intuitive AND made organizing/transfering your music to it just as good, then they may have something here, at least for PC users. God knows that the iPod for Windows and MusicMatch Jukebox is just embarassing to use.
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
At least with regard to the iPOD, Apple was late to the game. Archos had products on the market LONG before Apple released the iPod.
Keep clinging to the fantasy, that everyone wants to be as innovative as Steve tho.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Will I be able to jockey files back and forth between my friend's computer and my own?
To do this, why not just get a USB external drive enclosure for IDE drives or for old laptop drives(around $25-$30) and an old el-cheapo laptop hard drive from a computer show? For about $50, you can get several megs of file jockeying. No need to barf up $300 for an audio device to do this. Maybe to kill two birds with one stone, but just for sheer jockeying, it's not worth it.
guac-foo
Lots of petrified grits
Why not Ogg Vorbis?
I think it's because you're radically over-estimating the number of sales that such support would garner. I don't see any reson to doubt that the manufacturers do their homework and weight out whether adding such support would be a financial gain, a loss, risky, etc. A bunch of nerds on slashdot don't have access to the kind of market data that these guys have.
Or at least one would think that they are doing their homework. Is there reason to believe that they haven't? I mean besides a bunch of slashdot nerds claiming that the first manufacturer to build in Ogg support would be rocketed to the top of the heap through the sheer volume of previously untapped sales?
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
So it's $100 cheaper than the same size ipod
With a 90 day warranty, instead of one year. Perhaps they have less confidence in its shock resistance.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I have a mere 5gb iPod, and yearn for the 20GB - then I would only have to change out content once a month or less. As it is right now, I swap out some songs from time to time as I get tired of them...
I also like to record the MP3's at a fairly high quality so it's nice to have the space to store a lot of quality MP3's.
Of course, what I'd like even more is a player that supported OGG and loading software that supported bitrate reduction so I could squeeze more songs on the thing at a bitrate that made sense for a portable player.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From a design point of view, the thing LOOKS more like a HD with a display tacked on, than an MP3 player with a HD inside.
Not that there's anything wrong with that
a grrl & her server
While you may understandably think that a cheaper feature-for-feature iPod competitor would cause apple to drop the price on the iPod to match, there is reason this won't happen.
It's a common misconception that Apple in the business of selling hardware and software, much like people think that Nike sells shoes.
But Nike does not sell shoes and Apple does not sell computers. They are first and foremost Image companies, selling themselves -- they are their product. This is not a commant on quality, speed or anything of the sort, but it is on price. When you buy and iPod, you are first anf foremost paying for the the fact that is not simply a hard drive, decoder and DAC, but that it's a work of art put together by skilled Apple designers.
This is why Apple won't bother to match prices, because they don't need to. Though brand names may be little more than stories we tell each other, they are more than enough to justify a higher cost on an equal product. If the iPod does the same but looks better and has a better backstory, people will have little trouble justifying the extra cost.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Don't use them. I *DO* want an FM Tuner. I can't figure out why no one else adds one. I use my MP3 player at the gym a lot. When doing cardio I'd like to watch the news or the game on the TV, but to hear it I need an FM tuner. That's another device to bother with.
..though why someone would want to use WMA is beyond me.
Well.. without even needing to think about it, I can tell you one huge great reason why this player supports WMA over say OGG.. think of all the new users of Windows XP (of which there must be millions) all discovering the new features, which includes the ability to rip music from a CD and store it locally on their machine. What format does Windows Media Player encode in by default unless you buy an 'Addon' pack from people like Cyberlink? Bingo.. WMA.. and as most people use their system 'as is' without changing settings, chances are there are a fair few users with a harddrive full of WMA encoded tunes.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Multiply the figures, and you will see that the iPod is only 63% the size of the Zen.
Again, just like with laptops, size matters and weight matters, or else we would all be dragging around an Osborne-1.
Not to be an ass, but Apple has a bad habit of giving up on a market they have early dominance in (lot of topics on it recently... Newton for one. I guess you could say the same about the GUI based PC).
So my question is this the end of their lead in portable electronic music? Sure, the iPod seems to be right up there now but how long before someone makes a product that is "almost good enough" but that is a) hell of a lot cheaper b) supporting the latest whims of the market (Ogg support for example).
Apple seems to have a bad habit of being a Dad: "Oh no, silly user! You don't need that! haha! Trust my judgement!" Then everybody goes off to more friendly shores. Any evidence they won't do it this time?
What is music when you despise all sound?
That's right, nobody seems to care about frequency response, distortion, output power, all those other specs that actually determine how likely you are to actually enjoy listening to the damn thing. Nomad vs. iPod, fine, whatever... does anybody have a clue which one actually sounds better? Or does that matter any more?