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Microsoft, Sony Announce iPod Competitors
Pfhreak writes "According to the Denver Post -- Las Vegas section, a little over halfway down the page -- Microsoft will begin selling a $50 music player that will 'look and feel as good as the iPod' later this year. Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft VP, is quoted as saying that the player will give customers more choices than Apple."
In related news, Tetsugaku-San writes "The Register has the scoop on Sony's new portable audio/visual playback device. Impressively it plays MPEG2, MPEG4, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and MP3 (finally they got the message Apple was gonna whoop em!) straight out of the box. Not as good battery life as I'd like to see, but real world tests remain to be seen."
A 20GB Neuros is only $200, for one. Mad featureous, too.
While not there by default, there are third party solutions to this: ipod.itunes.
The Mothership
"Microsoft will begin selling a $50 music player that will 'look and feel as good as the iPod' later this year."
and the upgrade to 4 GB will cost $249! Duh, microsoft doesn't make hardware or the microdrive. Apple iPod sells cheaper than retail cost of microdrive and is only $70-90 more than OEM cost of microdrive. Apple charges only a small amount for iPod hardware/software.
Some are, the Rio Karma is out and already supports these. I hear the iRiver (120? I cannot remember which model is their top hdd player) is getting in a firmware release soon(tm). Of course the Karma 2 is comming out probably end of this year or next year and will probably support it, same goes for the Nitrus 2. Now we just need replay gain support finished!
Nomad Jukebox... archos... both were out long before the ipod.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
The Rio Karma has vorbis, flac, wav, and mp3 support right NOW and is 20GB and costs 250$ from WalMart or Amazon. Stop waiting and buy!!
Many people prefer to not have to carry around CDs. MP3s are smaller than AIFF, but a CD still doesn't hold much, comparatively.
Hard drives the size of those used in the iPod and Dell's products are relatively expensive. Go look at prices out there. They make up a significant amount of the cost of an iPod.
People will pay a tad more for Apple products. You may not. Many may not. But there are more than enough customers to keep Apple going.
You are comparing apples to oranges here. A fifty dollar MP3 player, barring some crazy-low priced MS model, is a solid state, small (relatively) capacity player. Or a CD player, I guess. Very different creatures than the iPod.
Taft
"That's just the way it is. I want my open-source, patent-free, DRM-free codec."
Instead of bitching about the lack of OGG support on Slashdot where it won't help matters, why don't you email Apple and tell them that you would be an iPod if they'd ship with OGG support? That would be the more constructive argument to make. Here, I'll even help you out and provide the proper link to submit your comment:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html
Happy codec hunting!
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Have you ever priced buying one of the little drives in an ipod or ipod mini individually? The primary reason that competitors can claim similar features cheaper is that their players are a bit larger, thus able to use cheaper hard drives. The smaller form factor of the ipod and the hard drive inside does add value. If you don't value the slightly smaller size, thats a perfectly valid opinion, but some people do value it, and the smaller drives are legitimately more expensive than larger ones with the same capacity.
Most of Apples competitors have only been able to compete in form OR function OR price, or 2 of those factors, never all 3. That indicates that the iPods aren't as inflated in price as you think, or with all the competition out there, they wouldn't be so hard to improve on. Apple does have a higher markup than some companies, but if they knocked $100 off the entry level iPod, I doubt they'd be making any net profit, and they are not a charity. The markup is not that dramatic.
No one will argue that iPods aren't expensive, but to say they are overpriced is certainly up for debate. In fact, I remember an old slashdot story talking about this very issue and pointed to an article on arstechnica. Found the article here.
Little Bricklets
I love my iriver igp-100. It's only 1.5GB, but it plays ogg, and several other formats. iRiver even plans on adding AAC support.
They do have ones with larger drives, like the H120, with a 20GB drive. Also with OGG Vorbis support. I like the blue backlights as well...makes it really easy to see when it's dark.
Yes it's heavier and larger than a Ipod, but none of the hard drive players are something you would jog with. It fits nicely in my front pocket. Also, the parent post forgot to mention that music can be sync'd to the Karma over Ethernet and it has a client that works well in Linux.
Although Apple did conceive IEEE 1394, it was implemented by Sony (as iLink) at approximately the same time as the iMac (as FireWire).
Intel owned the rights to USB, and I believe still does.
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of Apple and everything they do. Their energy is put into making existing technologies work better, which is something that they do brilliantly.
cat ~/background.jpg > /dev/dsp
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
If you're a 3rd year law student, you certainly proove that lawyers don't do much research before suing.
First of all, UFS is "Unix File System" and it was originally developed by AT&T in the early years of UNIX.
It's commonly used in various BSD flavored operating systems, and does not "belong" to Linux.
Google for "UFS file system" and you'll get tons of info on the subject.
Posting this as AC from another computer so I won't undo previous moderations.
That statement borders on blatant trolling! However, since I have faith in your high moral caliber and good intentions, I'll assume what you meant to say was "Dell laptops have higher rates of failure (or lower MTBF) than powerbooks, and here are the statistics to back it up. You can clearly see that the dramatic difference in failure rates justifies the 2x price difference (or some portion thereof, the rest being accounted for by superior features, etc).". That would be a convincing argument. Unfortunately, I've yet to see it phrased that way. Moreover, if your Dell laptop does happen to fail in a week, there is this thing called warranty, which I hear Dell is pretty good about.
And as for their music player, it's rediculous. They make you pay extra for "enhanced" (i.e. non-crippled) software, and I'm sure the hardware isn't as good as Apple's.I'm not going to deny that Dell's music player isn't the best. In fact, the iPod is much better, but I would make that choice based on the individual products involved (ie. the iPod, vs. the Dell player), not based on the companies' track records at making some other product (although you could argue that inability to make good laptops is correlated with inability to make good portable mp3 players ... but to that I say that just because a company makes better laptops doesn't mean it will make good mp3 players either). Similarly, when the MS player comes out, I'll judge it against the iPod based on the characteristics of those two specific gadgets - not the quality of Windows against Mac OS, nor the quality of MS mice over Apple mice, or some other equally irrelevant benchmark.
For instance, read any review of MP3 players and you'll find that Apple's sound output hardware (DA converters, amp, etc.) is the best.I would dispute this. The iPod hardware has nothing over, say, the hardware used by the Creative Jukeboxen (except, maybe, size, which is a separate category to sound quality when comparing mp3 players). The Jukebox produces sound that is no less clean and vibrant, and also supports things like 4 channel output and a whole heap of EAX post-processing (a small fraction of which, believe it or not, is actually useful!! I know, I had a hard time believing it too.). Not only have I read reviews that say this, but I've compared the sound from an iPod and a Jukebox too. Even if the iPod hardware is better by some absolute measurement of fidelity, it is not a difference 99.8% of the population would pick up in a blind listening test.
But you can't really market that.You're saying that in a device the purpose of which is to play music, you can't market the quality of the sound that comes out? If it's not marketable, why do the very reviews you speak of mention it? Tell you what, just send me some of whatever you're smoking and we'll call it even.
Microsoft's business practices (and OS) make me want to blow up their headquarters on a daily basis. I'm sure others agree with meWhat a concise summary of the rest of your post!
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
The HDD only spins when its queueing up new songs, and is rated for a certain amount of impact while spinning (3Gs, IIRC). I don't think that the g-force during a jog on something sitting on your upper arm is more than that.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
The Karma's a whopping 1.1 inches thick to the iPod's 0.62. It also appears to have been designed by someone with a terrible hangover from the late '90s.
After that, everything else is just quibbling. Still, I should point out that you neglected to mention the iPod's new lossless codec.
You forgot a few things on the iPod:
Width: 0.62"
Interfaces: FireWire 400 AND USB2
Extras also include Smart Playlists and auto playlist syncing.
Also, an interface that doesn't suck the balls.
- oZ
// i am here.
Funny, BMP/GIF/PNG/TIFF are graphics formats. So it plays MPEG2, MPEG4, and MP3 audio. Isnt MP3 part of MPEG2 standard, and ACC part of the MPEG4 standard?
iPod plays AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible, AIFF, Apple lossless and WAV; and can import via iTunes WMA (unprotected).
Whose got more choices?
um no quite.... Microsoft a) bought the exclusive rights by tricking Tim and his estranged wife into signing over the code, only after Tim complained about the fact that Bill used their divorce to trick the two of them out of it did he get a job at Microsoft.... Xerox PARC gave Jobs the go ahead, they couldnt see a use for either a graphical OS or a Mouse Jobs came by to see the graphical OS, and in the end they gave hime the rights to both without any fuss. Its only after Apple made it work that people say "they borrowed it" which was very much not the case. Now this is not exactly like what happened with Microsoft where they backcoded the Mac system 1 from the machines they got from Apple to code Word. Apple caught wind and told them they could only use it in house but in signing the contract (one that was signed well after Jobs was fired from Apple, otherwise it would never have been) the contract allowed for them to sell it. At first windows looked NOTHING like the Mac OS, it was only after Win 3.1 that the true nature of what Microsoft was doing was shown..... By that time it was too late.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I think the $50 was a typo (and of course the `editors' didn't bother to check. The linked article states $563 for the 20GB unit. The 20GB iPod is $399. If video playback is worth $164 to you, then the Sony device might be a better bet. Personally, I don't think it is. My iPod lives on my belt when I am walking and in the dock connected to my stereo when I am at home. When I'm at home I have a TV to watch video on, and when I'm walking I prefer to look where I'm going, so I don't really see video as a killer app. If I'm on a train or plane then I can watch video on my laptop if I need to (and battery life hasn't been an issue here since train seats started having mains sockets next to them in economy class).
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