iPod Shuffle Lookalike Hits CeBIT

An anonymous reader writes "It shouldn't be long before Apple's legal team goes after this one. LuxPro out of Taiwan introduced the Super Shuffle at CeBit, a look-a-like portable that is identical to the iPod Shuffle right down to the sihouette ads, but with the addition of an FM tuner and voice recording."

Comments

Hmmm...

[Richard_at_work]

I saw this a week or so ago, and the first thing what wandered through my mind was not 'They are going to get sued' but 'So this is the OEM version of the Shuffle eh?'.

There has been a lot of speculation that Apple never designed the Shuffle but bought it in from outside, guess we will find out if and when Apple sue over it.

The real question..

[lennywood1]

So how much are they? can they undercut apple but a significant amount?

even if they're a blatant ripoff, I'd buy one if they were cheap.

The Shuffle is a clone to begin with.

[argent]

They probably make them in the factory next door to the clone factory they make the iPod Shuffle in.

When Steve Jobs got on stage in 2004 and poo-poohed flash music players, concentrating on the high end, I was livid. He was talking about flash music players as if the big bulky high-end were the only possible competition. I immediately went to Apple's site and sent in a suggestion that if they thought flash music players were $200 behemoths they ought to have a look at the music player I'd bought for my daughter back in late 2002 or early 2003. It cost me $70 and it had the minimum features imaginable... no screen, no way to select specific songs, you just plugged it in like a flash drive and copied MP3 files over... and it played them in whatever random order they landed in memory.

I had even figured out the way to use iTunes with this player to get the equivalent of what they later called their "Autofill" function using their Party Shuffle. Sure, it only held a couple CDs worth of songs, but you could reload them when you recharged the battery overnight... so who cared?

Apart from the "reshuffle" ability, and the memory size (after all, this was 3 years ago), it was functionally identical to what Apple released a year later as the iPod Shuffle. It was a little bigger than the shuffle, but not much, and even hung from a lanyard like the Shuffle does. Oh, Apple's definitely done their usual wonderful job of [re]design... but all in all the Shuffle is just a few tweaks applied to the Magic Star "Gray Whale" MP3 player:

http://pc-memory-upgrade.co.uk/memory/magic-star -m p3-player.asp
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t g/detail/-/B000 08AJSO/002-0805304-2818432?v=glance

The killer feature of the Shuffle, for me, is that the 512M Shuffle is cheaper than the 512M "Gray Whale"! This may be the first time in memory that an Apple product was less expensive than the third-party equivalent... but it's got a lot less of Apple in it than most people seem to think.

Interesting WHOIS

[Chanc_Gorkon]

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Is the Shuffle made in Taiwan as well?

Booth Pic

[phoxix]

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2005/03/super _shuffle_f.html

The Shuffle wasn't the only thing they copied ....

audio quality

[line.at.infinity]

It might be pointed out that one of the chief negatives against the entire iPod line is that it possess lower audio quality than competing manufacturers.

This is the first time reading someone being concerned over the iPods' audio quality. I've read reports on the contrary, where audiophiles could not find problems with it. I wonder what the Consumer Reports report had to say, which the web page author refers to.

A typical anonymous coward

[FredFnord]

Try new Anonymous Coward Lite! Opinionated, and low in facts!

Apple has actually spanked MS a number of times in the last ten years, lawsuit-wise. The problem is that as soon as it begins to look like Apple is winning, MS immediately settles. One of the settlement conditions is always that neither of the principals will discuss the settlement, so it takes a little digging to get the information, but there are always some leaks.

For example, there was the company that MS paid a rather surprising amount of money to get a copy of Apple's QuickTime source code from. At the time, MS's video player was less than half the speed of Apple's, on Windows. So they just appropriated huge chunks of code wholesale from Apple's software. And, when Apple took them to court, they settled out of court. According to the best scuttlebutt available, the large MS investment in Apple in the late 90s, and the agreement to continue developing MS Office for the Mac, were part of the settlement.

-fred