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Inside Hardware Design - Competing Against the iPod
ihatewinXP writes "FastCompany.com has a behind the scenes article detailing Rio's (and others) attempts to differentiate hardware and compete in the digital music market against the iPod juggernaught. From the article: "We decided that we had to be radically different from Apple. Where Apple was sort of the ivory tower, we were going to be the dark rebel. Where Apple was very geometric, we were going to be smooth and curvy. Apple was so enamored with absolute pure, minimalist design that some designers may argue that ergonomics were compromised.""
Already getting slow...
Try the coralized link
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Worked quite well for Microsoft back in 1995. By the way, did you see the article about Microsoft and Toshiba cementing their HD DVD relationship?
Being a big player means being able to totally fsck-up the next generation of technology and still being able to walk away from it because your other enterprises are so wildly profitable you can afford the losses.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He's right, from an engineering point of view there is nothing special about the hardware in the iPod. In fact, the processor's battery-life and computational power is not impressive at all. What is impressive is the elegant design and user interface. That's where the iPod wins. The huge marketing budget doesn't hurt either...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
while Apple means quality we mean crap. Seriously I've owned 3 Rio devices and they all sucked, crapped out, and ended up in the trash. My iPod is still going strong 2 years later though...
I listen to music so much that I picked up an iPod dock for my car, and the Bose iPod dock for my office stereo. I get in the car, slip the iPod in the dock, it works, I get to work, put it in the Bose dock, it works. All of it is a really nice, clean, easy to use package.
Show me any other device out there that has that going for it.
> "I'm tempted to downgrade the iPod to the bottom because the only format they support that's not proprietary is MP3 "
What? Have you ever heard of something called AAC?
Sig Nature
The Karma plays both flac and ogg, fine, but it is NOT a mass-storage device, so you either need to bring around a special app for transfer, OR connect it to a network connector so you can access the web interface so you can access a java version of a special app. And don't get me started about the harddrives... The warranty is fine (For Europeans anyway, in the US I heard it is 90 days), but are you unlucky (as quite a few are), your Karma will spend most of its time travelling back and forth between you and the RMA department. Rio's new/other players does not support Ogg or Flac, but there were talk about a Karma 2 (All old features+sound quality, plus mass storage and not-so-crappy drives), and if that delievers, they have a sure winner among the geeks.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Your first paragraph almost prompted a knee-jerk, "What kind of crack have you been smoking" reaction from me.
Your second paragraph, however, made me wish I hadn't wasted all my mod points on the bullet train article - I'd "+1 Insightful" you if I could.
Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
The awful yoyo-shaped mice shipped in 1997, with the first generation iMacs, however, they did not have the whole body serving as a mouse button -- the later, capsule-shaped models do.
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
steven@pc226-2:~$ apt-cache search aac
libvorbis-perl - Perl extension for Ogg Vorbis streams
acx100-source - ACX100/ACX111 wireless network drivers source
daapd - Serves music files using the Apple DAA protocol
faac - an AAC audio encoder
faad - freeware Advanced Audio Decoder player
gstreamer0.8-faac - GStreamer faac plugins
gstreamer0.8-faad - GStreamer faad plugins
gtkpod-aac - manage songs and playlists on an Apple iPod
hymn - Hear Your Music aNywhere
libfaac-dev - an AAC audio encoder - devel files
libfaac0 - an AAC audio encoder - library files
libfaad2-0 - freeware Advanced Audio Decoder - runtime files
libfaad2-dev - freeware Advanced Audio Decoder - development files
libmp4-0 - freeware Advanced Audio Decoder - runtime files
libmp4-dev - freeware Advanced Audio Decoder - development files
realplayer - RealPlayer 10 based on the open source Helix player
xmms-mp4 - a mp4/aac audio player for xmms
steven@pc226-2:~$
That was hard wasn't it
I want a portable music player that plays Ogg Vorbis as easily as it plays MP3
I just bought an iAudio X5 digital audio player especially for the OGG and FLAC (lossless compression) support. The sound quality beats the iPods easily. It's even better sounding than the iRiver H320. The tiny 1.8" LCD screen for watching videos is so small that it's only a novelty feature, not really all that useful, but still kinda cute, but I bought mine to play music, not watch videos. Oh, and it has a pretty decent FM radio built in too.
I think the real question is... do you think Linus Torvalds bought a powerbook? Because that's one I've not heard before. I know he got given a free G5 PowerMac on which he runs Linux but what's this about a powerbook?