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Sony's "iPod killer" Fails to Draw Blood
Mr_Silver writes "Walter Mossberg (of WSJ fame) managed to review the new Sony NW-HD1 and was distinctly unimpressed. The upsides: it's smaller, lighter and has a battery life of 20 hours. The downsides: goodbye MP3 - hello ATRAC3, slow upload (and converting) times and the confusing user interface on the walkman, PC software and the music store. When will someone pass Sony the cluestick?"
It's nothing compared to the Rio Karma. The Karma supports true gapless playback, and has the best S/N ratio of any mojor HD-based player. The docking cradle has ethernet, and the player has a built-in webserver. Last but not least, it's less expensive than the iPod.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
The Rio Karma requires that you convert all your files to some lossy DRM-encumbered format before it will play the files back.
/Michael
Wrong. The Karma plays mp3, ogg, wma and flac. So no need to use a lossy format, nor DRM...
The Rio Karma is also unsupported by Mac OS X
While the Rio Music Manager is Windows only, the Rio Music Manager Lite is Java and should run on any platform supported by Java...
Creative is one of the most consumer-hostile companies in the world
The Karma is from Rio (as the name Rio Karma hints...). Rio is know owned by DNNA (Digital Networks North America) in turn owned by Denon. I fail to see where Creative enters the picture.
Could someone pass character_assassin the cluestick, please?
It seems to me that character_assasin isn't the one needing the cluestick...
I'm actually suprised the Karma hasn't gotten more press on slashdot. It's seriously the geek's mp3 player. The parent mentioned the webserver, but didn't mention that you can download a java app from the karma, and then upload music to it from any OS that has a working java implementation. I've been able to ass songs to mine from Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux this way. For me this is a HUGE advantage and shows a little bit of creativity/foresight on the side of Rio. Also the inclusion of open-source standard codecs like ogg and FLAC (For real audiophiles) is a huge plus. Yet, everyone on here is enamoured with the ipod.
At least when it comes to the iRiver - its due to the battery type. The iPod uses a Lithium ion battery, whereas the iRiver uses a more expensive Lithium polymer battery, which has a greater capacity.