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Mix Wi-Fi and Portable Digital Audio, Get Aireo
Midwestern gadget freak writes "What do you get when you mix Wi-Fi and digital tunes? The Aireo, which syncs with a PC over a high-speed wireless link instead of a cable or dock. It packs in other features not found in an iPod, but has a measly 1.5 gigabyte drive and won't work with any of the top music-download services. Its maker isn't a household name, but Best Buy will sell the things in a few weeks."
You could also broadcast a live audio from anywhere with network access, as well...
Your steps are a bit redundant, why not add
* open the door to you house
* go inside
* turn computer on
* wait for computer to boot
You dont need to start Itunes, it starts automatically when you dock the iPod.
You also dont need to pick playlists.
Unless its the first time docking you dont need to wait a while either its basically instant.
You want a complaint about waiting to syncing 10+ gigs wirelessly and compare that to a firewire or usb2 sync.
Yeah I do think the iPod is a bit overpriced and Im not an Apple zealot but if your gonna complaint at least be accurate.
I've been working on for a few months. We are a 20-gig hard-disk-based car product, with a REAL interface, and a wireless link (which can sync to a number of services). We also showed versions of our products at CES this year which can play MPEG1/2/4 (and DiVX) in both home and car flavors.
According to the features list, you should be able to listen to what other people are listening to. It contains an FM transmitter, as well as an FM receiver. I suppose they put the transmitter in for use in the car, but you could techniqually search the radio waves for someone elses transmitter.
Time after time slashdotters complain about there being no good OGG players, when iRiver's iHP120 has been out for months: iRiver iHP120 at Amazon It has a 20GB harddrive, plays MP3, OGG, WMA, WAV and ASF, has high quality MP3 recording with adjustable bitrate, has an FM Tuner, optical out, in-line remote with backlit screen, a longer battery life than iPod (16 hrs), and acts as a USB 2.0 harddrive with no software. Note that a firmware upgrade is required for OGG playback, but most of my music is in OGG and it plays perfectly with the update.
I think you've missed the point.
If you read there website it says it uses an FM TX to send the audio to the car radio, that is going to be lower quality than listening via a wire connection, I am not talking about the Wi-Fi link.
And if you knew anything about wi-fi you would know it is bi-directional, so both devices are transmitters, yes you CAN get good wi-fi, but it requires at least one good arial, and that device isn't all that big and last time I checked neither is my laptops arial. If you are wardriving you only need to passivly pickup other peoples signals from large arials which will give better connections because they are big (ie base stations designed to give really good reception).
The FM if for sending an analog audio signal, the wi-fi is for file copy, different things.
Archos has various accessoris that let you transfer files from a CF card to one of their very portable hard drives that also play mp3s and mpeg4 video.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
While it's good to see another hard drive based player in the market with some innovative features, I can see some problems with it:
Syncing over wifi is great, if a bit slow, but I don't think it will affect sales of devices like iPods for two reasons:
1. Many people who want players don't have wifi. The most likely to have wifi are people who own new Powerbooks, who are also the most likely to buy iPods as it's also made by Apple. It wouldn't really be worth getting wifi just so you could sync with the player, that would greatly increase the cost of the device.
2. The wifi syncing is really only useful for people who want to leave the player in their car. Otherwise, it's so little hassle to plug a player in to a cable or put it down in to a dock, either of which you'd need to do anyway to charge it (in the case of the iPod.)
OK, so lets say you can leave the player in your car attached to the cigarette lighter to keep it charged (my car doesn't have a cigarette lighter socket, but lets leave that aside.) Now, I can see a problem where the battery in the player is getting lots of short charges from the car. This isn't good for rechargeable batteries - they're better if they're allowed to drain completely and then charged up. So I can see a problem like the recent fuss over iPod batteries degrading quickly happening with the Aireo player as well.
If the player is in the car all the time, it won't matter if the battery doesn't work for very long, except for when you want to take it somewhere out of the car.
Really, car-wise, I can't see this beating the portable CD player I bought which plays discs of MP3s. It's not particularly great (it was a cheap one, much cheaper than the Aireo) but then again neither is the stereo in my car. However, when I want new music I can burn a new disc on my computer and leave it in my car. I effectively have infinite storage, and back-up of my music in one go. Also, if I buy a new CD I can listen to it on the same device, rather than having to take it to a computer to encode it. Now some proper car-based CD players have the ability to play discs of MP3s, if you want a good car-based experience they might be a better bet.
Back to the cable-based syncing: I'm not discounting that Apple, Creative and other MP3 player makers will put wifi in to their future devices. Once wifi becomes very widespread it will probably make sense. However, monitoring for wifi networks is going to be a drain on the players battery, so it will probably be something that needs to be turned on and off, which means if you forget to turn it on there's no difference between having to go and find the player and turn it on against finding it and carrying it to the computer and plugging it in.
And, lets face it, you're probably going to go to that computer anyway. That's the thing with MP3 players - generally they're carried around by you anyway, so having it in your pocket when you go to the computer anyway and plugging it in when you're there really isn't much of an effort. At the moment syncing involves bringing two pieces of personal equipment - the personal stereo and personal computer, together. You don't really need wifi for that, a cable is probably going to be long enough.
"What if they're using IE?" "I've dumbed Mozilla down to cope with it." - BOFH