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Rio Reveals iPod Mini Slayer
Remik writes "Rio has released a limited edition of its new hard drive based player called Carbon. Coming in lighter and denser (3.2oz with 5 GB of storage) than the Ipod Mini with the same price tag $249, twice the battery life, and nearly the same dimensions. Rio has only made 500 players available in the initial offering, so get one while they last. There's more info at cNet, Pocket Lint and Gizmodo. Highlights: Drag and drop file transfer, charging over USB and Janus compliance."
a whole 500. Sounds like someone doesn't really have anything, but needs to pump a stock price.
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I would not buy this for the same reason i would not buy the iPod from hp
Chicks love apple
fifteen jugglers, five believers
...does it support Ogg Vorbis?
Oh and don't mod me flamebait, I'm serious! Because the Rio Karma DOES support Ogg.
IMNSHO, one of the things, if not the main thing that makes the iPods and iPod Minis great is the interface.
However, I see no hints in the pictures as to what the interface is like except for the thumb-wheel on the top right. The Pocket Lint article mentions that the interface is the same as the Rio Karma, which I have never used. Can anyone enlighten us as to how the interface compares with the iPods's?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Why so few? WTF?
John Kerry is a Joke!
*Sigh*, no ogg vorbis this time around.
I think I'll stick with my iriver, thanks.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
This is so strange, just like the Ipod it doesn't have a built-in radio. I can't imagine why, the extra cost and size is minimal, and many people want to hear radio (news) occasionally.
It is strange since all MP3 players from taiwan/japan and european manufacturers have radios (often even the capability to record radio directly). Just Apple and RIO don't. Is it an american peculiarity, is radio so impopular in the US?
...which is so much better. It means I can give myself RSI while finding my song of choice. Brilliant!
I should have mentioned of course that I was indicating both the physical interface and the software interface. Both are exceptionally lacking.
That makes two of us. My first one lasted for about six-ish months before kicking the bucket - died the oh-so-common "stuck hard drive" problem, where customer service tells you to smack the unit to get it to work again. Ummm, no. Returned to the retailer under the service plan for a new one. Had the new one about two months before the same thing happened. RMA'ed it back to Digital Networks, got a refurb. Had the refurb less than five days before the exact same problem reared its head. That's Karma #3, and it went back to Digital Networks last week while I await a fourth unit.
I've got most of my music as
Same here. Partly geek-factor, partly because I wanted true stereo and better compression at higher bitrates, yadda yadda yadda. Regardless, I have pretty limited options for a small-form-factor, high-capacity player that suits my needs, so for the time being I'm stuck waiting for another refurb unit. Eventually, I may just re-rip my entire collection and start over with a different codec.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
Man, I don't know why everyone continues to say that the iPod is the only mp3 player with a good UI. I own a Creative Nomad MX, and you'd have to be next to retarded not to be able to operate it. Drag and drop mp3s across to the Nomad using USB 2.0, alter title/author/album names of multiple tracks with two clicks of the mouse, along with being able to browse through your entire library by the name of the song, artist, album, genre, or just pull up a playlist. Besides, who wants to spin their thumb in a circle for a few minutes looking for an artist or song on their iPod when you can use a much more functional scroll wheel like on the new Rio or on the Nomad? As good as the iPod might be, it definitely isn't ahead of the competition on any means except for it's brand appeal.
sigs are dumb.
Maybe its just me, but it looks like this will require 2 hands to operate the click wheel along with the menu buttons on the front. I mean sure they can't use the patented click wheel, but come on! Should it be so hard to put the buttons and scroll wheel within reach of one hand.
Not to mention, no dock or all the goodies gained from the dock connector port. Its a very nice attempt and will probably gain a small following, but this is no iPod mini "slayer" or "killer". It is however the first real competition the ipod has seen.
Roget's Thesaurus: Entry 19 (Imitation) - [snipped down to a list of words I felt were most applicable]
copying, duplication, reproduction, xerox, facsimile, simulation, impersonation, personation, semblance, parody, take-off, lampoon, caricature, plagiarism, forgery, counterfeit, imitator, echo, parrot, mime, imitate, copy, mirror, reflect, reproduce, repeat, do like, match, mimic, simulate, impersonate, follow suit, follow the example of, walk in the shoes of, take a leaf out of another's book, strike in with, follow suit, take after, model after, emulate, mimic.
Finally, in the words of Wordsworth, "like - but oh! how different! "
Thanks to the Project Gutenberg thesaurus
As ugly or bad this player may be, it primarily sucks because it still does not support Ogg.
When can we finally get a player to play royalty-free stuff?
echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
A scroll wheel is nothing like the clickwheel on the ipod. On the ipod you can scroll through the entire list in a continuous fluid motion. On a scroll wheel you have roll and reposition, roll and reposition, roll and .... well, just try out a scroll wheel vs. an ipod somtime and you'll immediately see the difference.
Is that worth losing a GB and some battery life? I don't know... for me it is, but perhaps not for some. My point is just that the devil is in the details. This is the one thing Apple does really get. Just because they both have some type of "wheel" does not mean they are equivalent.
Cheers.
I think we all know the real questions:
How easy is it to get at those 5GB drives?
How much do 5GB microdrives go for on Ebay?
Is that case recyclable in my community?
Will the 5GB drive work in my iPod mini?
And... of course,
WTF is that monstrosity?
Parents, don't buy your ipod begging children one of these for Christmas.
First off all, at 192Kbit, this player won't fit a thousand songs. Secondly, who ever scrolls through that many songs trying to find a single anyway? Don't most people, like me, only select a playlist or album?
So the wheel is superior, but do you notice the difference in daily use? I don't on my Creative Zen NX 30Gb, which has better battery life and cost $150 less than the 30Gb iPod when I bought it.
That's exactly what I did. I had started to encode my CD collection to vorbis, but gave it up after I realized hardware support was going to suck. I ended up encoding the collection in FLAC, then batch encoded all the FLAC files to LAME APS. This gives me the flexibility to use any portable player, in my case it ended up being iPod and iTunes.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
I had a Nitrus fail after 93 days...They wanted to charge me to replace the drive - price was close to the price of the original unit...
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I didn't realize they only had a 90 day warranty on their products when I bought it...Now, I will never buy another one of their products again. I mean really, a 90 day warranty!? I'll stick with someone who makes a product that has good enough quality that they can stand behind it for at least one year, preferably 3 years. What good is a product if it doesn't work after 3 months?
Side note: they don't mention the warranty duration in their userguide...And I couldn't find anything specific on their site about their warranty on this new product other than: http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/support/rio/warr
My friend had a Nomad. He dropped it from 3 feet and it broke the hard disk. Of course I couldn't help taking my ipod over there, plugging it into his stereo and dropping it from 3 feet as it doesn't skip.
Sorry to post twice, but I forgot to mention this before. Here's your study in contrasts.
I bought an original Apple iPod back when they first were introduced. A couple of months ago the hard drive in it died, and rather than pay the $270 Apple wanted to fix it, I decided to spend about another $100 and get a new model. Upgrade and all that.
Well, wouldn't you know it, I got a bad one. It worked fine out of the box for a couple of days, but then it froze up and couldn't be reset.
I called Apple (I ordered my iPod online) and the guy checked my ZIP code and told me to take it to the Apple store at such-n-such address. I did, waited in line for about 20 minutes (during which I surfed the Net on the G5 at the store). I showed the guy behind the counter my iPod, and he said, "Wait just a minute, please." And he disappeared in the back with my iPod.
About a minute later, seriously in almost no time at all, he emerged and said, "Here you go." And he handed me a brand-new, still-in-the-shrinkwrap iPod box.
Me: "Huh?"
The Guy: "Here's your new iPod. Sorry for the inconvenience."
Me: "What's the catch?"
There was no catch. If your iPod breaks and it's under warranty, take it to an Apple store. They will hand you a new one and send you home. No Bangalore call center, no RMA, no waiting 2-3 weeks, none of that. Just "Here's your new iPod. Sorry for the inconvenience."
That was just cool.
I write in my journal
Strange. A few weeks ago we had HORDES of people swear on a stack of Bibles that transcoding MP3 to ATRAC sounded horrible! Well, maybe 18 people running bad software in a flawed test, but those 18 people MUST be right!
I had a Nomad as well. It dropped from 2.5 feet, and the headphone jack broke. The hard drive started clicking, too.
:)
The limited experience I've had with the iPod gives the impression that it's just a better-built product. The interface was nice. But damned if I'd spend as much as they're asking for it; not because it's not worth it, just because I'm poor
Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff tha-- MICRO$OFT IS THE DEVIL!!1
The thing that gets me about the IPod and this are that one simple thing could really make them stand out. Which is a display with not so much a crappy 70's calculator gray background, but a really crisp white/clear background?
So someone's got to know why we can't fix this?
By making 500 units, Rio is really making a statement.
Unlike the iPod mini, which was so successful it blew away Apple's ability to manufacture to meet demand (hence the production run joke), Rio is taking a wait and see approach by only investing in the production of 500 of these units.
My wild-ass-guess is that they want to project market demand with the first run and if numbers come out the way they want, they will build more. If not, then on to the next iPod mini Burninator.
This may be a good for Rio but bad for the early addopters of the pilot devices who get left with an uncommon Rio unit that may well be unsupported soon.
The iPod mini is a sure thing at the same $249 price point and, oh yeah, it plays Fairplay tracks so you don't have to support the evil that is WMA.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I own an IPOD 4G/40GB that I pruchased the first day it became available. I have only one small problem with it. I tried to use it for my AM run. Every time it tries to access the HD, I had to stop because the jaring was causing it problems. Okay, I needed a memory chip based MP3 player. I looked around and decided on a RIO Cali 256mb. It plays WMA and MP3. I refuse, for phylosophical reasons, to use WMA. To encode a MP3 file from my CD collection I had to register my product, give them my email address, and download the "Lame" encoder. They restrict the download to 3 times for the encoder even though it comes under the GPL (its backed up on my LAN and I burned it on CD just to be safe).
Using iTunes the encoding of my CDs was fast and easy. RIO was a pain in the ass and slow as hell. A few of the songs came out in such poor quality they needed to be redone. It took me 2 days to get a playlist and about an hours worth of songs on the thing. It is no where near as intuitive as iTunes.
It does work well and has good sound quality. I hope they really improve their software or it will not even come close to being an iPOD buster.;
I used to be a paranoid, now, I'm just a noid.