Dcube: Portable Audio With Ogg And A Scroll Wheel

Slowtreme writes "There have been many attempts recently to cash in on Apple's iPod success. Napster, Dell, and others have made iPod clones. This Korean Dcube looks like they are going all out. With 1.5 gig, Ogg and MP3 support, grey scale display, USB2.0, wireless, FM radio, it looks like a nice device. Most noticeable however is the scroll wheel, Apple holds patents (pending) on scroll wheel design. How much noise will this make?" (The Napster-branded one is actually a Samsung product; Samsung, too, is supporting Ogg Vorbis in some models, though not in that one.)

Comments

Re:OGG? What is that about?

[gunnmjk]

OOoo Ogg is open source! It's free! It sounds so much better! Screw that nobody uses it, get off your high horse and download some MP3's.

Re:Rio Karma supports Ogg and FLAC with 20gb for $

[big_gibbon]

Erm . . .

Surely the point is that this *isn't* an iPod? And one of the reasons I chose a Karma was that it, also, is not an iPod. Don't want to be associated with shoddy kit like that :)

P

It's not a wheel, it's a knob

[ajs318]

It's not just a wheel. The wheel is just the physical interface. There's also the way it scrolls through long lists quickly, and the way it interacts with the other buttons, that make it such a great and unique piece of interface design.

What the hell are you smoking? It's a bloody knob, for crying out loud! Wireless sets have had a bloody great knob for changing the station pretty much ever since they were invented. True, this one's connected to a shaft encoder as opposed to a variable capacitor or a pot, but that's hardly unique; and you actuate it from the top surface rather than around the rim, but at the end of the day it's nothing more than a fancy knob. I seem to remember there being a similar kind of thing on some DJs' CD players, where a revolving disc is used to search for a specific passage. And I think there was something similar on posh VCRs, but I was always too poor to afford one like that :) That was the state of the art as it was prior to the advent of the iPod.

You can't just say "It's a wheel!" without recognizing the enormous amount of effort and care that went into its design and engineering. The wheel is what makes the iPod unique, and it deserves its success because of it.

That is the most pretentious piece of obsequious toadying I have heard in a long time.

This is one of the good uses of patents, in the sense that it gives a manufacturer a temporary monopoly as a reward for innovative design, and will hopefully spur other innovative designs in the iPod comptetitors.

Good use of a patent my arse. That patent should never even have been awarded in the first place. Whoever was responsible for not throwing it straight out has a lot of explaining to do.

Seems like a good thing to me.

Just get your face out of Jobs' arse, will you? People like you give Apple fans a bad name.

newsflash: iTunes sucks dick

[turkeyphant]

What the hell? I couldn't bear using iTunes. It's bloated and featureless. Its sole purpose is to help me steal music over the school network with the assistance of MyTunes.

I use EphPod to put music on my iPod. When I'm using GNU/Linux, XMMS is my musical staple. If I'm booted into Windows, I'll use WinAMP 2.x to play my music over iTunes every time. iTunes has shitty encoding options - it doesn't even come close to EAC with LAME or whatever your encoder of choice is. However, my biggest complaint about iTunes is its insatiable hunger for resources and slow response. Plus, it takes up half my screen, has zero customisability and I can't find a half-decent visualisation for it anyway.

Good software, my eye.