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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%.
Any market can be regarded as "wide open" if you have products of superior quality. Well, unless you face a big bad wolf-like company or state-owned monopolist that's giving you plenty of headaches and lawsuits.
www.weberseite.at
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.
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/
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!
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.
Reminds me of the old adage: "Second place is the first loser"
I always thought that was a rather annoying way to look at it. In this case I think it applies. 65.8 : 6.4 is just over a factor of ten. Damn Apple really does dominate that market. Hopefully this works out for iRiver. Otherwise there probably not going to last long. They're getting creamed (at 5.6%).
Though I suppose one can say by the same logic Apple is getting creamed in the computer market. Though I wonder how their numbers compare to other vendors (ei Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony, etc) as opposed to apple vs. the entire PC market.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
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."
^_^
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.
Can't you just imagine it....
some idiot set of spotty 17 year olds parked on the corner of your street in their Civic, complete with spoilers which are half the size of the car, blacked out windows, neon lights flashing under the body and the rear seats replaced with bass speakers.
Up goes Netstumbler, or whatever and lo there's a connection there, "riceboy". You connect with the well documented passwords and there's the hard drive, full of ghetto rap.
Hmm, so if I drag and drop this Vanilla Ice track and delete their "music" ....
(In all seriousness removable drive in a USB2 cradle would be a nice way to provide for these devices, and you could take it out at night for security if necessary)
Why the heck is it taking the auto industry so long to add simple network connectivity to cars? I know it's a price sensitive market, and potentially a security problem, but I've been anticipating this "no brainer" option for years....where is it???
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?
That's nonsense.
Wiring up a car stereo is easy. It's no different than pluging in the speakers of a house stereo. Removing the trim to hide wires is the hardest part but even 'shop monkeys' can do this easily enough.
Are you also saying that my Alpine is worse than the piece of crap that came with my Honda? I don't think so.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
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.
Can someone please make a car with a stereo that has an audio input? Does such a thing exist even in aftermarket? Assuming I already have a portable music player, I could just plug it in to my car stereo. Instead, I'm stuck using some pathetic mini FM transmitter, or cassette adapter if I have a cassette deck, or buying a whole new HD car stereo.
*sigh*