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Jens Of Sweden MP3 Player With OLED, Ogg
rune-bare-rune writes "Gadget manufacturer Jens of Sweden launches a nice-looking MP3 player with an unusual OLED display that doubles as a mirror. Supports MP3, WMA and OGG Vorbis. And as a few other really small players it handles the USB connection nicely."
the Tom of Finland MP3 player...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Jens of Sweden normally has excellent product design, so it's somewhat unfortunate that the button size appears to be as small as possible. The 4-way rocker doesn't look like it'll be fun to manipulate.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
Ah, great. A mirror. Just what I was looking for in an MP3 player.
Good thing, 'cause I think they're gonna need one. ;)
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
It looks like a rebranded iRiver to me...
They're still making devices with USB 1.1? Especially for something like an MP3 player, where you're moving large amounts of data, USB 2 is a must. For low-end devices with only 512M of storage, you're going to be doing a lot of adding/removing of files, which makes having to constantly wait during every session a hastle; for the larger devices, it's insane to have to wait forever for your collection to transfer over the outdated 1.1 spec.
In a world where modern machines come with USB 2, and it's also backwards compatible with USB 1, there's no excuse to make an mp3 player that only supports USB 1.1.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
... assuming it's real and not vaporware.
I haven't seen any practical OLED apps, and if this is one of them consider me sold on the technology.
Also, it's worth mentioning that my agency did a fingerprint analysis on the user in the picture and our results have conclusively indicated that she is in fact:
A NATALIE PORTMAN CLONE!!! We knew it was possible!
Amen brothers!
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Personally, this form factor (similar to Creative Labs) has some appeal to me. I know everyone says that the HD's in iPods are shock proof and this and that, but for using at the gym or while running, you can't beat this super-mini form factor and solid state construction. Great to see they're offering some value-adds such as ogg support.
Need more information. Please help.
Anybody got a mirror?
..does it play Ogg Vorbis?
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
"And now with our included mirror, you can insure that your eye patch is correctly aligned so your other (music) pirate friends don't point and laugh!" Argh!
Insert witty Slashdot sig here.
This looks like a great product, as I'm sure anyone who's looking for a solid state Ogg Player will agree, but the website is a joke, and is bound to alienate the customers they are trying to market to. Just hitting the front page, I get an unrecognised "Flash animation" in the middle of the screen and get booted into a plugin download page. Surely most people will want to see pictures of the product, not some silly Flash animation (Has anyone seen the content of this -- is it at all useful?)
Something also strikes me as strange with their software requirements list: Windows 98-SE/ME/2000/XP
Mac OS 8.6 or newer (Linux as well) -- What's the deal with that? If it supports Linux, they can add it to the list. Do they really thing that putting one of their best features it in brackets like an afterthought is going to help endear their product to Linux users?
I find the ad disturbing- why two left hands????
Look at the photo yourself- that's weird huh?
+5 Observant
and with 512mb you could store ... 2 albums!
As a true blue slashdotter, I have a bit of an acne problem. Can I get one without the mirror?
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
Hammacher Schlemmer, the listed reseller of Jens of Sweden's product in the US, has one of the older models - the MP110 - for $249.95 with 256MB of storage.
o =e l_audio
http://www.hammacher.com/publish/70549.asp?prom
I would think this model, the MP130, would be at least as expensive, but likely more.
-B
Okay, that's just cool looking and I give them huge props on the look and feel. Even the USB-port-slide-out-feature is very cool. Not as certain about the "joystick" feature.
But what is with the 256MB capacity? I am not trying to be an Apple zelot here, but with the iPod Mini, hasn't Apple really drawn a line in the sand where Style and 4GB capacity intersect at a sub $250 price point?
The way I see it, no one who ever uses a high capacity digital music player (remember back when we called them MP3 players?) will ever go BACK to a low capacity sub 100 song player. Just won't happen. You get hooked on the ability BROWSE.
But anyway, nice looking toy
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
>Isn't that a man's hand holding the mirror to allow
>lipstick to be applied to a woman's face??
It had BETTER be a different person, or they have two left hands...
*grin*
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Did anyone actually spot anything on their site that mentions that the display is OLED? Looks to me more like the OEL (Organic EL) display that some newer car stereos have (new Pioneers, etc). Last I heard blue OLED had some MTBF troubles...
That is, if you can keep it clean and free of scratches. I know some people who have their caseback so badly scratched up that its pretty much lost its reflective properties.
Yes yes, -1 Redundant. But no one's posted about it yet. Does it work with Linux? A friend of mine has an earlier model, and it doesn't seem to get detected as a USB mass storage device under 2.4.2x. He's a captive windows user and this is one of the main reasons he can't drop it completely.
I'd try it on 2.6.5, but he doesn't want to upgrade (?!) and he uses it too much to lend it to me to hack with. So do any of you fellow linux-only users have one of Jens' recent units working?
I've been to the vorbis site and listened to the ogg samples (Scroll down to the bottom and listen to the 45k/sec samples) of low bit rate compression. It sounds really good at really low bit rates. Scroll up a little and listen to the mp3s at 64 and 128, and then listen to the OGG at 64. That's the quality of mp3 at 1/2 the space.
Couldn't these companies take better advantage of the ability to play OGG files and include the compressor to actually fit more music in less space? They could advertise a player that holds "more music" in a less expensive package. Instead of advertising the storage space, advertise the number of hours of music, and compare to competitors that cost 2x as much.
Would be good if the player is actually made and designed in Sweden. Too bad it's not. Fact is, the flash-based MP3 player market is largely dominated by the koreans.
Try to pose your hands like that in a mirror. You'd have to have some pretty funky elbows or a reality distortion field or something.
I guess the RSD(TM) is already patented
I agree that bashing a product or post the lifts up a product, simply because it is not made by Apple is bad. However, i would not go as far as to say we shouldn't be allowed to automatically hold the product to the standard Apple has set.
After all, Apple has created a 'reference standard' for the digital media player industry by which all other digital media players are, in my opinion, rightly judged. The same holds true for Windows. Apple Linux and before it Unix were and remain compared to Windows, the reference standard for desktop OS.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
kinda refreshing in a way :-D
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Clones are basically artificially created twins...
Fingerprints are formed during fetal developement and are not determined entirely by DNA
IOPS players have been on sale in Korea for some time now.
Although most of us will see the mirror display as, at best, a novel cosmetic touch, I've shown these pictures to a girl I happened to have about the place and her response was instant enthusiasm.
She pointed out that it's always good to have a mirror handy, especially in situations where you aren't carrying your usual bag-of-tricks, such as when you're jogging - with one of these and a tube of lippy in her pocket, a girl would be ready for anything.
Her one criticism was that that small mic hole, right in the middle of that otherwise unobstructed stretch, would be an irritating distraction for anyone giving their make-up a quick check. I figure that such an infrequently used feature could have been placed elsewhere without affecting its utility. Also, I think they should have extended the right up to or even around the corners, increasing the mirror's ease of use (I presuming that the mirror is just a protective fascia placed over the actual OLED display).
At the right price point (and I think it is), this could seriously challenge Apple's mostly female targetted Mini ipod.
If Natalie Portman has hands like that, you can keep her (it)?.
Eeek.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Tell me what you see here: IOPS
It will work with Linux 2.4+, according to the manufacturer.
Actually, it seems to be targetted at geek guys who think that, if they were carrying around a mirror, attractive women would stand close to them while putting on makeup.
The person holding that MP3 player is almost certainly a man.
I'm not sure if it is a man holding it, but whoever it is has two left hands. Creepy!
its a MP3 player article where I get to yell WHERE IS THE ACC SUPPORT instead of everyone yelling where is the ODD support.
And I get to yell WHERE IS THE SPELL CHECKER?
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
OLED implies a thin-film organic LED. If it's an LED, I expect a device that behaves like a P-N junction and operates at low voltages like a standard silicon or other inorganic LED. Organic Electroluminescent is totally different. OEL is a monolithic material that fluoresces under high voltages and low currents. OEL is what is used for backlights for many portable devices and is ultimately not as efficient as OLED (because of the HV stepup) and does not have as easily a tunable color range as OLED.
So who told you that they were the same thing, huh?
and if you look a little closer you will notice... they are both left hands.
If you were actually using a PCMCIA 16 bit adaptor then it's likely that you couldn't reach near 9MB/s anyway. PIO 16 bit with no buffering (there probably isn't any in your CF PCMCIA adaptor) is going to be slow as heck. The connection you get is akin to pre-UDMA hard drives. The maximum theoretical speed on 16 bit PCMCIA is 33MB/s (the same as ISA) and using PIO (since you don't get DMA using this for IDE) there is only going to be half of that (16.5MB/s) available to transfer data. Without any ram to buffer the IO you are likely going to drop your performance below what the card is even capable of.
Try your benchmark again with an IDECF adaptor plugged directly into a drive controller (or IDE/Firewire bridge if you are limited to the laptop) and see if it makes a difference. It ought to!
As someone ignorant about OLED technology ... how exactly are they creating a mirror finish here. Is it dynamic? One minute it's translucent and not mirror-ish, the next minute it's reflective silver colored? I don't get it, and I don't speak "bork bork bork."
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
The IEC TC 110 WG/4 recently agreed in April 2004 to call them all OLED now. Here's a news report, in Korean. I can't find any links in English though.
The capacity difference between the two cells is not
.53Ah = 6.7kJ for the Li-Ion cell.
as large as the Amp-hour rating would seem to indicate.
Li-ion cells operate at about 3.6 volts, while NiMH cells
operate at about 1.2. Thus, assuming constant voltage
during discharge and zero internal resistance (incorrect,
but it makes this easier), you can calculate capacities of:
1.2V * 2.2Ah = 9.5kJ for the AA cell and
3.6V *
Given the higher energy density per mass of Li-Ion
cells and the form factor flexibility ditching the
AA provides, this seems like a good tradeoff.
>>doubles as a mirror.
:-)
Come on, folks. OGG is a nice bell and whistle, but a mirror? That's just chrome.
Is it just me - or does it look like this woman has two left arms? If I'm right, her thumb in the reflection should be on the /other/ side.
I'm fairly certain it's the photographer's hand that is holding the player. It's easier to get a good shot when you can shift the mirror with your own hands. And besides, otherwise she'd have two left hands.
Jens of Sweden has never developed any technology of it's own. Their game is to rebrand other manufacturers mp3-players and make the exterior look somewhat better. I don't have the energy to find a link, but this is common knowledge.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Why is it that the "design labels" of our days have the need for rebranding of far eastern goods? As someone already pointed out in this tread, this is a rebranded Iops player.
I remember Bang & Olufsen when they launched their failed cellphone series. It was just a rebranded Ericsson phone, in three more colors at twice the price. My guess is that todays consumers are too vary of these things and JoS will fail unless they cooperate and innovate like certain other companies.
The absolutely worst case of rebranding ever was the North Korean government: They bought / stole severeal Huyndai cars and rebranded them (illegaly) as their own brand. Everybody outside NK understood what was going on, but this was a publicity stunt for their own people to convince them that NK had an up to date booming car industry.
I bought their MP300 a couple of weeks ago and I absolutely love it.
One thing that isn't mentioned on the MP300 page (since usage is illegal in Scandinavia), is that the player includes an FM transmitter that can be enabled by running a small program.
Does the MP130 have this functionality as well?
In God We Trust, Others We Monitor
This player is extremley similar to my Muzio (www.muzio.co.kr) player, which also has an OLED display (in fact, Jens one looks like the same one running on slightly updated software). Same button combination too. The Muzio is great - 512MB memory, line-in, direct MP3 encoding, FM radio, voice recording. BUT big drawback - the OLED display is shockingly bad. You can hardly see it at all, when at full brightness, in bright sunlight. Very annoying. Apart from this, I'd recommend the Muzio, but the Jen looks more stylish... and you get a free mirror!!!
Actually, they often develop the specs themself and let the koreans develop the tech.
Jens of sweden is a company that brings cool korean gadgets to europe. But not any cool gadget, only those up to their specs. If nothing fits the koreans adapt their products. Capitalism in a nutshell.
I have a link but its in swedish so its of no use anyway.
This is my sig, show me yours
Specs from the press release (which is only available in nordic languages it seems):
The recommended prices are SEK 1795/2495/3295, which translates to very roughly $240/$330/$430.
The MPIO FL-100 already havea mirrored surface. You can also but the FL-100 at your favorite retail outlet. No USB port though. But it does have some Linux support
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
http://www.i4u.com/article1489.html
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.