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Virgin's New iPod Rival
iammaxus writes "CNET has the scoop on Virgin's new iPod killer. Favorite quote: 'Virgin said support for open standards such as WMA will let people select the music service of their choice.'" While this doesn't look like a bad player, it's the same price as an iPod mini (and incompatible with the most popular pay-per-download site), so calling it an iPod killer seems a bit premature.
Nice to see that Virgin Electronics has a sense of humor. If only it were a good one...
To be fair they're not really any worse than any of the other privatised rail companies are they?
;)
I don't use rail all that much so do correct me if I'm wrong.
(I'm sure someone will anyway
There's no mention of this on the UK sites, so I guess it's US only.
The UK market is much smaller, and is dominated by cheap clones - in fact most people have 128MB MP3 players.
The neuros mp3 player will let you record from fm, and even broadcast FM to another receiver (though I never got this feature to work very well).
I've got an older one you can buy for $50 - contact me if you're interested (mgkimsal2@yahoo.com). It's just 128 meg - no HD. You can buy a HD separately if you like the player. I don't recall if there's a MIC line in or not, but there's a built-in MIC you can record from.
creation science book
What, you mean like This one?
Of course, the CNET article doesn't actually say that... and also mentions mp3 compatibility... so it was just a stupid post, really.
The Virgin site seems to be slashdotted at the moment, so I'll see what their marketing says about it, but I'm doubting they'll use open and WMA together...
Stupid sexy Flanders.
No playing Real content on a Mac just requires the mac version of Real player, this incorporates Real's own DRM system.
Real reverse engineered Fairplay DRM so they could encode Real content to play on the iPod.
Real could've have gone non-DRM MP3 and that content would play on a iPod just fine. But they wanted DRM protected stuff on the iPod so it had to be encoded in Fairplay, the only DRM format iPod supports.
iTunes can encode to MP3 OR (non-DRM) AAC not just AAC. iPod can play both MP3 and AAC (non-DRM or fairplay encoded)
When the UK's railway service was privatised -- which was probably the worst thing that happened to the railways since they were nationalised -- the Government of the day made sure that Virgin received the absolute worst rolling stock and worked the absolute worst routes. This was a deliberate attempt to discredit Richard Branson {who had previously expressed the belief that he could do a better job, and thus had to be taken down a peg or two}. Branson has money, for certain, but seems to realise that it is not the only thing which has intrinsic value.
The Public was conned into believing that privatisation would benefit them in some way, thanks to a series of privatisation initiatives throughout the 1980s in which Thatcher sold us all what we used to already own. Cut-price shares in the likes of BT, British Gas and the artificial companies formed from the breakup of CEGB were targeted towards small investors, who then sold them on to faceless investment banking corporations for a handsome profit. Why did people buy these shares anyway? Thatcher sold the family silver, that is certain, but how could the eventual purchasers live with themselves for being complicit in one of the greatest crimes a government has ever committed against its own citizens? Did you need a piece of paper saying you owned a share in a former Nationalised company? Wasn't it enough to know that the British blood in your veins entitled you to a share in the operations which make up this country's essential infrastructure? Or did you just feel the need to flaunt your superiority over your neighbour because you had shares in company X and they didn't?
If I was transport minister, I would at once re-nationalise the railways; and proceed to raise the money necessary to bring them up to a reasonable specification, by prosecuting everyone who had ever owned so much as even one single share in a privatised railway company, for knowingly dealing in stolen property. And for my next trick I would prosecute the "Labour" party for misrepresenting itself as the People's party {there can be no such thing as a Labour party without Clause Four, "To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service"}. After seven years of Blair, the nation's wealth is distributed less equitably than when he started, and fox hunting is still legal.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
And lo, the MSN music store (launched today, wait for that story) has exactly the same rules.
I still don't understand why someone would want a radio tuner, I bought my iPod to listen to the music I want to hear, not what Clear Channel tells me to. Same thing with my DiscMan and Walkman before it. I gave up on radio years ago.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I appreciate that the parent poster was joking but it is worth pointing out that if the Apple store starts to jack up the prices, there is nowhere else you can legimately purchase the AAC files that they sell.
Off the top of my head:
-Magnatune
-Real's Music store (yes, it sells AAC at 192kbps)
-Allofmp3.com (dubious legality aside)
AAC is by far a more open format than WMA. Anybody could setup a music store to sell AAC files. Now, doing it with DRM and supporting the iPod or iTunes is a different story, I grant you. But Real did it and following their lead might be a good approach.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I disagree to some extent. I received an iRiver H340 yesterday. While I won't get much initial use out of the following features it is good to know they are integrated and I won't need to purchase a seperate device to get them later: FM tuner with recording, dictaphone, image and text-viewer, and support for connecting to cameras and other devices through USB.
The other features I couldn't be without: Playlists, multiple audio-formats (with upgradable firmware which could support more in future, and even video), the awesome equaliser that includes WOW, SRS and TruBass, 16 hours of battery-life, 40GB of disk-space with no restriction on what you can load on it (essentially a portable HDD), and a verbose but simple-to-use tag-browser.
And lets not forget, the interface is damn sexy, and usable with it.
From Walmart's site:
Quickly find your favorites from over 400,000 songs - rock to country, hip-hop to pop. Exclusives, too!
From Apple's site:
Select from over 1 million tracks from all five major and more than 600 leading independent labels.
How is 400,000 a wider selection than a million?
I looked through half this list and I only found one other person who noticed it.
You can debate all you want about capacity, DRM, WMA, MP3, open source and what not. That's important. But if you approach average joe who doesn't know the difference between all of that, what iPod succeeds where everything else has failed, is it's interface.
Every function on an iPod can be accessed by your thumb on a very simple user interface. Between 4 buttons and a wheel, the person has absolute control without having to push buttons in corners, sides, and what not.
The nature of the scroll wheel allows the overall package to be very slim and small. Until someone else can dream up of an interface that's easier to use and more efficient then iPod's scroll wheel, then iPod will reign king for a long time. And don't expect a scroll wheel to come out on a non iPod player anytime soon. Apple has the rights to it from synaptics.
actually, Windows Media 9 format is open in as much as MPEG formats are open. the DVD folks required MS to do so.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3