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Sony takes on iPod Shuffle
Ben writes "It seems that Sony has decided to take on Apple with a low cost flash based player that will go up against the Shuffle.
Pocket-lint has
the low down on some of the stats,
as does the BBC and Engadget." The major improvement in my eyes is that some models have an FM tuner.
I bought my iRiver iHP-140 40GB player because it had a tuner and ogg support. The only other one I considered was one with a built-in FM transmitter, but that thing was a brick and seemed to have supply issues. You'd think for the cost of the iPod (twice what mine cost) it would at least have a tuner.
Every month, someone "takes on" an iPod. The next month, we don't hear about them again.
FM tuner? I can buy one of those as an accessory add-on thanks to the burgeoning "iPod economy," as Jobs puts it. I even have that FM broadcaster that lets me dial into the frequency with my car radio to hear my iPod through my car speakers without any special hookups.
I don't see Sony's player going anywhere. They feature a display, which Apple abandoned as being pointless in a tiny flash player (and they're right). And it's still more expensive.
Damn, I should have read the press release (emphasis mine):
Oh well, never mind Sony. Better luck next time.
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The problem with AM is two fold. First, the wavelengths are much longer, so the small antennas can't pick them up as well. Second, AM has to have the amplitude of the signal preserved perfectly during amplification or you get distortion in the audio quality. In FM you can distort the hell out of the original signal, you just care about the fruency it is at. This makes AM tuners harder to implement than FM tuners.
It's more a problem of the technology behind AM than anything else. Not that they don't want to implement it.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
The thing about these flash players, though, is that they don't have the capacity to hold your entire library. The process of selecting and transferring files as you describe is fairly labor-intensive.
With the iPod shuffle, you can tell iTunes to automatically select just the right number of songs to fill it up, at random, taking your song ratings into account.
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FM receivers on these devices are popular at gyms. An area of society that eludes most Slashdot readers. Most of the TV's at the gyms are muted, and broadcast the sound on an FM frequency. A quality FM receiver is not needed there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
iPod Shuffle 512M -- $99
NW-E405 512M -- $130
NW-E505 512M+FM -- $150
iPod Shuffle 1G -- $150
NW-E407 1G -- $180
NW-E507 1G+FM - $200
iPod Mini 4G -- $200
70 hours? Odd. The Register reports 50 hours, with a catch: "Sony claims the devices will operate for a staggering 50 hours on a single charge, but that's when playing back 105Kbps ATRAC 3 files in "power saving mode". It's not clear what this mode is - presumably it's with no EQ and the display turned off. Still, it's a big leap over the Shuffle's 18-hour play time."
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