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iRiver to Build In-Dash Digital HD Players
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like iRiver is going to take over where the Rio Car left off. Their CEO announced today that they are near completion on a new plant in China that will produce HD-based in-dash digital music players for automobiles. The new plant can push out 700K units a month. With the iPod dominating the digital portable market, iRiver sees this as a wide-open area they can move into. According to MacWorld iRiver is the third leading seller of MP3 portables with 5.6% of the market, following the number two seller Rio which holds 6.4% of the market. And the Apple iPod? No surprise, only a whopping 65.8% of all units shipped. 92% if you only count HD portables."
These numbers cover only US and are based on August sales. Since the new Ipod was recently launched, it isn't suprised that it sold well in the August.
Apple's global marketshare in the digital audio player market is about 20%.
US patents apply to any product sold in the US regardless of origin. This was covered in-depth in a recent topic regarding patents. If you do a search it should come up and you can find the relevant law/code.
http://www.busyweather.com/
That really depends on the shop. In my area we have several shops that only do after-market audio, security, remote startup, etc. installs and their work is a thing of beauty. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't let me dealer do it.
From TFA: "One that pulls from the dash when you want to load a significant volume of songs and takes flash media when the user only wishes to transfer a few tunes."
^_^
To be fair though I'm sure a lot of people would be willing to pay for this convience ( I certainly would ) because it is just so ... convienent.
As regards security I can't see how it would be any more or less secure than any other wireless network and if it is only offering the opportunity to add new music or delete the existing music then in a worst case scenario all you'd have to do is park your car and download all your songs again.
This would be such an obvious and useful piece of functionality it's really annoying it's not available yet.
I'm surprised no one has mentoned the Pioneer DEH-P90HDD. This is a head unit that will play from an internal 10 GB hard drive, memory stick, or an audio/mp3 cd. Nice looking player, and I've alwaysed loved Pioneer, but it isn't cheap.. $500 to $600 on ebay.
They do.
The more recent Alpine head units can be upgraded with an adaptor box (the KCA-420i) and then you can stick the iPod in the glove box or out of sight in the boot/trunk and control the iPod from the controls on the head unit.
http://www.alpine-usa.com/driveyouripod/
I imagine it won't be long before other manufacturers are doing the same kind of thing or integrating it into newer head units directly.
This is what you're looking for. It gives you the option to either sync with your home PC via 802.11b at regular intervals or to copy files via USB to the drive caddy. It's Linux based, though you need a Windows app to enable the wireless sync. It's also not particularly cheap. Still, this sounds like what you're looking for.
Once your device is connected, you go to a different menu on the iRiver that looks like a primative explorer, and use it to transfer files between the two devices. It's a bit clunky but as something that's not it's primary function, it works quite well.