Neuros Review

An anonymous reader writes "MP3newswire.net has just posted a lengthy review of the Neuros digital music portable. Just recently the company announced native Linux support for synchronizing the Neuros and we all know that Ogg Vorbis support is promised in the near future, so the unit is drawing a lot of interest. For the most part they liked the player, though they found the unit to be relatively big and heavy for a new generation portable. They also found the file transfer interface to be both impressive and glitchy."

Comments

Another recent review

[blamanj]

...is from USA today. Bottom line, Neuros doesn't match up to the iPod, at least not yet.

Expensive

[daserver]

It's pretty expensive on amazon. 128mb for 240$ and 20gb for $380. You can get an Apple Ipod 10gb for 280$

How's it compare to the Archos

[BFaucet]

What advantages does this have over the Archos player? It's cheaper, has the same amount of drive space, and plays video.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/mp3/5b44/deta il /

Still offering a discount...

[Emmettfish]

Hey, folks. If you like what you see in the Neuros, drop me a line at emmett (at) neurosaudio.com, I'll give you a discount that you can use on the website should you want to buy one.

Also, drop me your mailing address, too; I might be able to send you extra goodies. Don't worry, I'll make sure your E-mail address and mailing address are kept private. Thanks!

Emmett Plant
Community Outreach
Neuros Audio

Re:Just make it work

[2nd Post!]

So... why not get an iPod?

You're willing to spend a bit more, and you don't have to deal with any product design issues...

And it just works. FAT32 iPod.

DIY
GTKPod

Rio with OGG and 100Mbit ethernet...

[altman]

On the other hand, the Rio Pearl (though it's not shipping yet) does OGG, MP3, WMA, FLAC and WAV. And crossfading. And parametric EQ. And the battery lasts much longer. And it's very small and light. And it has 100Mbit ethernet (as well as USB2.0) with a built in webserver and Java music management apps for linux users.

What would you prefer?

See http://www.dapreview.com for more info.

Note: I'm biased. I'm working on it.

iPod Sacrifices Features, Affordability For Size

[meehawl]

The iPod is elegant, small, lightweight, and has a simple, good UI(not to mention, read-only address book/calendar stuff).

Yes, iPods are smaller than many other disk-based MP3 players, but they achieve this compactness by sacrificing features and expandability. They cost around 50% more than equivalently featured MP3 hard drive players. They have no digital line-in recording, no mic facility, no FM radio, and no easy way for users to replace or expand the device's batteries or hard drive. Unlike most of the new generation media players they also feature no MPEG 4 video playback or recording. They have a weird, all-or-nothing metadata approach to storing music that forces you to use the moderately featured iTunes freeware to utilise the iPod to its fullest instead of being able to use some other full-featured, non-freeware media jukebox software. Their battery life is shorter than (AFAIK) all other disk-based HD MP3 players. I gather from the iPod usergroups that the new-gen iPods are getting between 5-8 hours of playtime, and this is with new, fully conditioned batteries.

On the plus side, they do look cute, and fit in most pockets easily. Well done to Apple for figuring that a large proportion of potential MP3 player buyers are not interested in advanced features, and will pay a significant premium for compactness and a simple, constrained interface.

In the 90s, AOL similarly spotted that they could capture a large proportion of online users by offering a simple, integrated system. I think iPods are "training wheel" MP3 players for many people. It remains to be seen whether Apple can manage their new users' experience growth and release more compelling iPods using latest technologies so that these maturing users graduate to more fully-featured iPods and do not desert to other manufacturer's media player offerings.