Slashdot Mirror
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."
No wonder iPod has the lead. iRiver HD players really are great, and they sound better than iPods, but unfortunately they're still a bit pricey in comparison. The only contender atm would be Rio Karma, but for those not feeling like smashing them repeatedly every now and then the Karma isn't really an option... About time someone put an effort into car MP3 playback - I'm surprised it hasn't been done properly earlier.
Anybody know if iriver plans a competitor to the ipod mini? I have an iriver flash player that I absolutely love, but I am jonesing for 4 Gb of storage. Their little 1 Gb circular player was a little too soon and too small in capacity. However, I don't want to give up my FM radio and I don't want one of the bigger 20 Gb players. So I keep waiting...
Download my free songs!
These numbers are applicable for the US. I guess the situation is a bit different on a worldwide scale, as iPods are not an "in" thing in Europe by any standards, as well as fairly unknown here in Finland.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said today that based on a survey of 600 teenagers, Apple's iPod is dominating "mindshare and market share." Munster said in a research note that of all the high school students surveyed, 16 percent currently own an iPod and 24 percent plan to buy an iPod within the next year. Munster also noted that the iPod ranked fourth on the teens' holiday wish list--behind clothes, money, and a car--even though the iPod was not an answer option and had to be written in as a response.
http://www.busyweather.com/
I have an Omnifi for my home and car.
The car version, a 20GB hard drive that I had professionally installed under my rear passenger seat, lasted a week. Made by Rockford-Fosgate, in a large case to support the hard drive, you would think it could take the bumps and shocks of the road. It couldn't.
It would skip when I would hit a bump, even at 15 miles per hour pulling into the gas station. At the point it would skip, it would lock up for 30 seconds, then resume, but every 30 seconds would pause for another 30 seconds. Ejecting the hard drive and putting it back in would reset it to the point of the bump, then it would play fine until I hit another bump.
The pro's of the unit were you could plug a USB 802.11b card into the casing, and automatically transfer your music wirelessly right into your garage. If you didn't have a wireless network, you could eject the hard drive and it had a USB port to hook up to your PC. It had a really slick interface in the car, and setting up a wireless network over the in-dash spin dial thing was a breeze, they did a a really good job with that, with the different ways you could input your WEP key.
The cons were the bumping of the car made it pause, the USB wireless network adapter just kind of hung out in your car, no where to mount it. And the software interface on a Windows pc (SimpleCenter) was one of the most horrid music applications I have ever used. And it didn't do Ogg.
I'm skeptical of any hard drive based car player until they can more than account for the shocks and bumps, and it needs to come with some kind of warranty plan. How long will those hard drives last?
It'd be sweet if it had Wi-Fi - you'd just have to drive into your driveway and it'd automatically sync. Doesn't look like that's the case though.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
But the thing that closed the deal for me? USB hosting. I no longer have to lug my laptop around on holiday because I can plug my camera into the iRiver and store the files on it's internal HD. All the colour screen, upgradable firmware, internal mic, radio, remote control, not needing custom software by appearing as just another drive, etc. is just icing on the cake.
Various people have spoken about wifi in digital media players (including Apple advertising for wifi engineers to work on future iPods) but this is a real case for it.
;-)
A car media player with a Wifi link would be ideal as the owner could then download tracks to it without the need either to walk a laptop out to the car or the car stereo back to the house.
the benefits of being able to browse people's music collections while driving would be entirely incidental
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
This is a very neat solution I'm using myself. You can control the ipod with the on-wheel CD changer controls. Hardly a hack.
Yes, several manufacturers have aux inputs of one form or another. My Sony stereo I had a decade ago had an aux input on the front of the unit. My current stereo (the factory-installed Alpine unit in my Mercury) does not have an aux input per se, but has support for a CD jukebox, and there is an aftermarket aux input box that fakes the head-end unit out into thinking it is a CDDJ - thus giving me tape, in-dash CD, and my OpenNEO35 80G MP3 player.
I agree with you on the FM transmitter and cassette adapter - they bite rocks and suck. The FM units are usually NOT crystal or synthesized and drift all over the place, as well as the built-in limitation of 15kHz due to the way stereo multiplex works, and the cassette adapters have neither good base nor good treble response. I could not believe the difference when I got the CDDJ box installed.
Personally, I'd like to see the high-end car stereo manufactures put in a 3.5mm aux jack on the front, a pair of RCA's on the back, and a Bluetooth receiver - but that is about as likely as seeing a good candidate for president. I've got the hot tea, anybody have an atomic vector plotter?
www.eFax.com are spammers
It is my understanding that their marketshare of hard drive based players is much higher than 20%.
- 40% of tracked retail Mp3 player sales in Europe/ America/ Japan, though figures elsewhere are lower
- Over 10% of MP3 decoder chips made are used for manufacture of iPods
Those sales figures are still a bit misleading- they reflect Apple's performance against flash players, which they do not make.
Even if recent news reports are correct and those figures are high, Apple still remains overwhelmingly dominant among hdd based players.
I use a PC, but we gotta give credit where credit is due.
Well, what do you expect... it was a MERCEDES! Buy a Kia and find out how nice the factory stereo is.
I'm looking to get rich. I've got steps #2 (????) and #3 (PROFIT!) planned out, but am having trouble coming up with #1.
Check out this site. They sell converters so that you can plug just about anything through their converters and then right into the head unit without FM transmitters / modulators: you get dual RCA jacks.
I found this site yesterday because I'm in this market. I want to build a small ITX carputer and hopefully mount it in my new '04 Civic HX so that the car still looks stock. It'll have 802.11x and a removable HD, and I'd LIKE to tie it into the stock head unit so that I can change songs using the regular track forward/backward controls: maybe use the cd increment/decrement button to skip to the next/previous letter in the alphabet. Ideallly it would display the track information right on the stock LCD, but I'll probably just go with a small monochrome LCD and/or a 5" screen that can fold out. To do any of this though, the LogJam converter will need to do the conversion for me, or I'll need to figure out the pinouts on the head unit and I'm sure the whole thing will void my warranty, but that's life.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"