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Rio Brand Closes Doors
Castar writes "In a press release today, D&M Holdings announced the end of the Rio brand. Rio had a troubled history, but were responsible for the first mass-market MP3 players as well as more recent popular players such as the Rio Karma. This closing follows the sale of Rio's IP to Sigmatel, maker of chipsets for many audio players, including the iPod Shuffle." From the release: "The company's decision to exit the Rio business followed a determination that the mass-market portable digital audio player market was not a strong enough strategic fit with the company's core and profitable premium consumer electronics brands to warrant additional investment in the category. The original goal of strategic advantage with wholly-owned and branded portable client devices was reconsidered in the context of the costs required to effectively scale and compete in this sector, where competition has grown intense. D&M Holdings will now focus all its resources on the core Premium AV business and advanced content server products."
We got pwn3d by the iPod.
Translation: We're sick of getting our ass kicked by the iPod. We give up.
Goo goo g'joob.
"We've closed because we weren't making any money out of it anymore"... meh.
Truth is, Apple simply crushed them with superior development, product and marketing. Apple also maintains a strong market share from the popularity of Podcasting (free advertising) and the Apple Music store. Not to mention a generation that embraces the Ipod and its culture, who can blame Rio for jumping ship?
What they did offer was a nice alternative. I owned a Rio mp3 player and functionally it worked just fine, no qualms. In fact, I enjoyed having a unique player, rather than the trendy Ipod. The problem was Rio just didn't offer any compelling "stand-out" features and the pricing was on-par with Apple's Ipod selection (which gave buyers very little reason to migrate to a Rio player).
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
I didn't buy a Rio for one simple reason: No expandability. I couldn't add a larger memory card. So I got a little Kodak camera/mp3 player instead that could use compact flash.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
well someone had to say it
FragHARD or don't frag at all
Now if only Creative would follow...
Personally, I'm a little dissappointed. I have a Rio S35S. It's no iPod, but it hasn't given me any trouble, battery usage is good, takes an SD card. Overall a quality product.
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Somewhere, in the depths of Apple Headquarters, Steve Jobs busts out the champagne.
Say what you might about non-ipod music players, but the Rio 600 was a reasonably good, affordable device... I still use mine for some offbeat audio applications - such as adding sound effects to Halloween costumes...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Rio's continual delays regarding the next-gen Karma were a bad omen. While other companies were already pushing 4th gen iPods, Rio couldn't bring a successor to a very technically sound and beloved player. The Karma had the potential to be a real iPod killer based on its function. Remember, it could play OGG and FLAC way before other players could. It was cutting edge and people rightfully had high expectations.
It would be such a day if, that is, I knew who the hell Rio Brand was.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...to ever fail miserably was the Rio Car. An in-dash computer for playing music, running linux on an ARM processor, with a hard drive, and ethernet - too bad it cost something like $600.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Your competitors get to watch what you're doing, learn from your mistakes, then jump in at the right time. I'm not saying that being first in a market is never a good strategy, but it's long past the time for the business development people out there to wake up and recognize that if you have a first to market strategy, you'd better have an excellent plan for capitalizing on the initial advantage.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"not a strong enough strategic fit" == "we couldn't compete anymore"
A press release means never having a reporter respond to your "I'm resigning for personal reasons, to spend more time with my family" with "Senator, what about the dead body they found in your bathroom?". Not that today's reporters ask Senators anything more than "where do I get the press release?".
--
make install -not war
I own an Empeg. It's now several years old, but at the time, was the best tech out there for putting MP3s into a car. In fact it's still nothing to shake a stick at.
But the empeg folks sold their outfit to rio and started working there. That was pretty much the end of the empeg. It was never really marketed by Rio, and the price never came down much. Rio pretty much let it die. It should have been a really popular product.
if they could have just got that "Riocasting" thing off the ground.
VOTE!
HA HA! The iPod has killed an "iPod Killer" SUCK ON THAT! In all seriousness though, this sucks as i was looking forward to the Karma 2 and the Chroma. Now they will never be shown. R.I.P. Rio.
Ok, enough of the Apple wins Rio loses comments. Anyone know if the Rio brand will still have support from anyone? Meaning if someone's Karma dies now...is there anyplace to send it?
I was wavering between an iPod and a Karma not too long ago. The thing that made me choose Apple was the simple fact that about 60% of reviews of the Karma (on Amazon and other online review sites) were negative. People seemed to love the Karma for about 91 days...and the warranty runs out at 90 days. I read many reviews that said the hard drive died after about 100 days.
I think that is the reason Rio is going under...it has nothing to do with Apple directly. It is the fact that it seems Rio was putting out shoddy products.
But what does this have to do with Duran Duran?
I'd rather use a player where I am not limited to closed formats like aac.
Let's not forget paying $60 to replace a battery.
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Does it hurt when you talk out of your ass like that?
With the increasing price of oil, and consequently plastics, I can't help wondering what the face of computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average computer uses as much as two circus tents worth of coal to run on any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed, you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one compelling reason not to.
Similarly we should demand quality in design and upgradability in our portable electronics. This comes with a cost, but one that pays dividends in reliability, environment, and sustainable computing.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/shop/_templates/i tem_main_Rio.asp?model=266
Looks like it's still available for sale from this place. Great for running.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Exactly. Just buy a cheaper product like this http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTool s/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1527025&CatId=0
20GB player for $159.99. Great deal if you ask me.
AAC is not a closed format, it's the Fairplay DRM that can be attached to it thats closed.
Take the CD's you ripped into iTunes, transfer the songs over to a Sony PSP (renaming the extension to mp4), they'll play.
The sole reason I bought the Rio Karma was its ability to play OGG files; the open source alternative to Mp3 (and is arguabley a better codec than Mp3). When my Karma dies, what do I do with my 15 gigs of Oggs?
Are you a moron? 1. It does not cost 60$ to replace your iPod battery, its costs as low as 30$ + My Battery has lasted over the last 19 months! 2. It supports MP3! Do you need a more ubiquitous format?
Remember that they were subject to one of the first music industry lawsuits relating to digital distribution? I found a summary here.
blarg.
That's great. There WAS NO substantial market for this stuff before Apple came along and did it in a consumer-friendly way that made it easy for non-geeks to download and buy music. They practically created the market that you're accusing them of ruining. That makes sense. I guess.
I'd rather use a player where I am not limited to closed formats like aac.
Silly troll. I have 1000+ songs on my iPod and it has no AACs on it. I have all mp3s that I've ripped from my own CDs or bought from (gasp!) non-Apple music stores. Try knowing what you're talking about before posting. It makes these forums a little more useful.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Personally I like the flash players - I'm leary about the hard drives, plus every flash player I've seen is easily expandable and smaller than most hard drive models. I use mine primarily at the gym, so don't need 20GB of space, just enough music for a couple hours.
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There's a reason it isn't called Riocasting ...
... the IPODs. There was a reason that acronym was thought up ... (I forget what it stands for, but in the end it was families with debt who had to have the latest technology, who weren't earning enough but were getting by, but had very high stress levels, or something like that).
iPod is the walkman of the '00s. Other players will catch up by the end of the decade though, and then it will turn into a market like '90s walkman clones. The marketplace will still be defined by the term iPod though.
A British newspaper even identified a new social class in the UK
Is D&M Holdings the remains of Diamond Multimedia or something else?
AAC is open. It's owned by Dolby Labs and anybody can license it. It is as free for licensing as mp3 is. You do realize that mp3 also requires a license?
You're probably thinking of iTunes music store songs which is AAC in a DRM wrapper. Would you hate mp3 and call it closed if Apple managed to put a DRM wrapper around the mp3 format? Do you rail against the umpteen million models of Windows Media players out there?
The iPod also plays mp3's. So, unless you limit digital audio to a player that plays OGG and FLAC you present yourself as not really knowing what you're talking about.
>The average computer uses as much as two circus tents worth of coal to run on any given day. What an idiot.
"[The Rio Carbon's] got the right attitude, and the right hardware. Apple could learn a thing or two from this media player."
-- Maximum PC
What, like how to suck?
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Our shit sucked, and the iPod kicked our ass.
Are you a moron?
Ummm... no. One Google search found this site. The battery is $28, replacement fee is $20 and shipping costs would probably make up the balance. Perhaps not exactly $60, but if a person doesn't have the expertise to replace it himself, it could easily be $60. There is no way I've spent even $30 on AAA batteries for my Rio.
Also, we bought my sister an iPod Shuffle for her birthday back in Feb, and it's dead now. I'm guessing it's battery, good thing it's under warranty.
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I bought 2 Rio's and they both messed up with the same error within weeks.. They should QA their products better.. I'm sure the RMAs killed them..
I'm as much in favor of competition in markets as anyone else, but the particular complaint you make is pretty silly.
Insecure, Pressured, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden.
p x?o=18
http://www.reform.co.uk/website/pressroom/news.as
Only in the sense that they were one of the first to be able to work with Linux... back when USB support under Linux was still a bit shoddy as well. PDA & Smartphone Optimized Sites PDA & Smartphone Optimized Porn
I've seen you on the beach and I've seen you on TV
Two of a billion stars, it means so much to me -
Like a birthday or a pretty view
But then I'm sure that you know it's just for you.
threadeds blog
ReplayTV is also owned by D&M, so those of us that own and love ReplayTVs should hope D&M keeps it going!
Sad to witness a good, innovative brand going down because another company uses juvenile mass-marketing to push its underpowered, overpriced rip-off through.
Amazing how stupid the American people is.
Rio's MP3 players have always sucked. Mod me troll if you want, but I'm just telling the truth.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
It's name was Rio and it looked good in your hand
Until the iPod made it seem totally bland
The loss of profit was too much for it to stand
Oh Rio, Rio Apple killed the Rio Brand
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
(afaik)
portable digital audio player market was not a strong enough strategic fit
More like their audio players were pieces of shit.
Wife had a Nike PSA before philips took over and it it was a lemon
Silly troll... Try knowing what you're talking about before posting... etc
That's what makes it a 'troll.'
YHBT. YHF. HAND.
They really only ever got it right once. The Rio Karma is the perfect music player and at the recent pricepoint of $180, it's exactly everything a music player should be. The problem was that they originally asked too much for it. I mean 20 Gigs of music for $500? That's ridiculous. But 20 gigs for $180, that's reasonable. I just got my Karma in May and I have to say I love even more than the iPod I had before. It does a perfect job of segueing from one track to the next with no blank hole like the iPod. Absolute perfection. But having one good product and a slew of failed products is what makes a company go out of business... So bye bye Rio.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Oh please. Of course something is more expensive if you can't do it yourself. Computers, driving, your statement could be applied to any kind of service. Plus what kind of Rio do you have? Does it have a harddrive, or is it flash based? What kind of screen does it have?
Not a very portable way to play tunes, though...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
A proud owner of a Rio. Should've waited another two hours before posting, dude!
The Carbon's built in mic - making it a small and convenient package for catching musical ideas, recording meetings, etc.
I still love my carbon...
I was waiting for a punchline.
Fornicating with Ipods is likely to cause an electric shock , remember that kid who tried to ply the battery open ?...
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
You do know you have to charge the Shuffle, right?
Between Rio's flagship MP3 player (Karma) having major reliability issues (eg hard drive, scroll wheel) and absolutely zero marketing (Rio has never run tv commercials or anything of the sort) I'm not surprised this happened. I own a Rio and while I love it, it's easy to see that switching owners three times set it back considerably and strapped it for resources, at a time when Apple's outclassing them in every visible way *and* has a giant marketing budget for the iPod.
:) Seeing as how Denon is retaining the brand rights, they could very well attempt a comeback in the next decade or so when the market's matured considerably.
Farewell Rio. You made some great products, you made some poor ones, but I do love my partially-working Karma
Anyone remember the Empeg? The linux based car mp3 player that Rio bought and renamed? That thing was pretty slick. I still see them on Ebay every once in a while.
I bought the very first RIO that they released and believe it or not, my wife still uses that old thing - LOL. It's waaaay obsolete now but she doesn't mind and it gets her through one hike (barely - its only 32MB!!). Now it's officially a collectible - sign of the times where a 5 year old device becomes a thing of the past...
Actually, I would say things are cheaper if you CAN do them yourself. Most iPod owners aren't going to attempt it, just like most car owners don't repair their own cars. Including the cost of labor is reasonable.
My Rio is an S35S, flash based, screen, I have no idea. Granted, it isn't a 20Gb or 40Gb iPod, can't really compare it to one of those. Can compare it to a shuffle though, and I have had mine twice as long and probably used it twice as much as my sister without a problem.
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For all the talk about open source stuff around here, it's surprising that nobody ever mentions the Neuros anymore. Name one other MP3 player that actually has an (encouraged) open source alternative to it's proprietary firmware and native ogg support (I know others have this, but I belive Neuros was the first).
Ogg is vorbising for you bitch!!!
Sorry.
... or maybe fermented cider?
They drink apple juice
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
These are the great features I really like in my karma:
:)
- Ogg codec
- Parametric equalizer (you adjust the frequency response width)
- Ethernet connectivity for file transfer
- Java ui downloadable from the onboard web server
- 10 hours solid battery life
- Rugged (took on motorcycle trips and international flights)
- The dock glowed translucent blue while playing music or charging, you get to glance that "all you got is that white brick" look
Good engineering, sweet features, solid product. It will be missed.
You do know you have to charge the Shuffle, right?
Really? You don't just warranty it when it quits working???
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http://www.virgindigital.com/ virgin digital's player still seems to support the rio family of products. i dont think they are going to disappear overnight.
People don't care about Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. They just don't. In fact the only time I see the word "Ogg" even mentioned is on Slashdot. Ogg and FLAC playback, therefore, just aren't killer features in a player. Everybody uses MP3 (and AAC).
iPod won because it was designed extremely simply with little fluff. While other tech devices have pointless buttons, seams, and lines all over them with long names like "SONY DIGITAL XD450c," iPod was always as simple as a CD player and looked nice. The clickwheel makes it fun to use. I don't know, it just seems really obvious to me why the iPod won and competitors failed. When I go to the local store and see the iPods next to all the bizarre-looking WMA competitors that scream "tech device designed by engineers!" instead of just "music player," there really is no comparison.
As a sidenote, it's amusing how my Wal-mart puts the iPods at the bottom on the floor shelf and hangs all the crappy alternatives above it where people can reach. They have a WMA-based music service to sell, after all.
"Sufferin' succotash."
True, if they had been making a profit they probably wouldn't have been shut down. (What businessman would do that?)
But 80% of D&M is geared towards a high end home entertainment market (read, "not portable"). And, try as they might, the company couldn't find a good merge of their tech with the rest of the company and Rio was hemmoraging cash in greater and greater sums threatening to take the rest of the company with it and it was hard trying to rationalize, "we'll spend x and do y and then we'll take marketshare away from Apple!"
It was a hard cut.
It's more like this:
Diamond Multimedia was on the road to recovery. Despite falling sales of modems, and the video card market crash after 3dfx started making their own boards (which also claimed Jazz, Hercules, Orchid and Canopus's US market, just to name a few), DMM had made smart moves into selling motherboards and, of course, the Rio.
Then Diamond made the boneheaded decision to purchase S3. It was like they had done a complete 180...S3 was in serious trouble, and Diamond was in no position to bail them out.
The Rio's successor was more of the same: just more built-in memory, no new features. As a result, they lost momentuum.
Eventually, Diamond faltered under the wave of crap. S3 was sold off to VIA, and the audio division of Diamond became SonicBlue. Then ReplayTV sucked, and SonicBlue missed the boat on small hard drive mp3 players.
So, you see the lovely lack of foundation SonicBlue has been trying to stand on. I wonder what they're going to dop now that they sell virtually nothing. Maybe sell off the name to some other company.
Indicentally, I've noticed that the Diamond name has been revived recently, not a bad move for a distributer wanting to open a new market in the US.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I still have my Rio Volt SP100 that I purchased in April 2001, and it still kicks ass! I remember my friends buying bulky 6gb Creative Jukeboxes for > $700 and thinking they were throwing their money away. I was right. I still burn Mp3 CDs (hold ~6-7 albums at 192kbps) at $0.40 a disc. Forget flash memory, CDs are still the cheapest medium for storage. Combined with some NiMH rechargeables, IMHO this device still can't be beat, even when compared to an iPod.
I've always found trolls to be interestingly ignorant creatures.
t _id=3264563
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?produc
True, it's not Apple branded but now that the HP deal's over, it soon will be. They'll be at Radio Shack too.
Many people don't like the iPod. I'm sure you'll find a legitimate reason.
Unless your overfunded startup hits a submarine patent ofcourse. But, hey, thats just the cost of doing business.
/greger
I thought AAC was owned by Thomson Labs (RCA)/Fraunhofer and that you had to pay royalties to them in order to use it?
Or maybe it's only for encoding... I'm kind of confused.
Those bastards owe me $40!!!
Daaamn you!!!!!!
I blame Clinton.
In fact right now I'm listening to some FLAC-encoded music on my Rio Karma through my stereo.
The Karma is a technical masterpiece. Any audiophile or Linux geek who doesn't own or yearn for a Karma is quite crazy.
Reviewers and market analysts unvariably bestow the title of "iPod Killer" on a new DAP based on one or two big features. Maybe it's size, or maybe it's Ogg Vorbis playback that makes a player an iPod killer. In my opinion iPod Killer isn't a feature but an overall package. The iPod is exceptional in no particular area (except perhaps design). It is so successful because it is a solid overall package that performs everything at an acceptable level.
The Rio Karma was the one player that, from a technical standpoint, I believed could be the iPod killer. (Of course, the marketing strength of Apple prevailed, which says a lot about the market). But technically the Karma defeated the iPod on all fronts. Ogg Vorbis and FLAC playback were the big ones, but it's the little things that really make you appreciate it as a player.
Gapless: My Karma is getting long in the tooth, but there's nothing out there, even today, that comes close to the Karma technically. I couldn't ever go back to a player that doesn't have gapless playback (i.e. automatic elimination of the gap between subsequent MP3 files (inherrent to the MP3 format), and playing gapless Vorbis and FLAC files back gaplessly). None of the HDD players do this (if you know of one that does, please let me know! I want one!)
97dB S:N RCA Line Out: The RCA ports on the dock provided an amazing sound on high-end equipment via the true line out. Using a 3.5mm->RCA adapter in the headphone port just isn't the same.
100Mbps Ethernet port: Not having USB2.0 at the time I, and many others bought the Rio Karma, the ethernet port on the dock was a great way for not only uploading files quickly, but uploading them from a distance, e.g. with your Karma sitting in it's dock on the stereo or hooked up to your car stereo in the garage (using a laptop with wifi to bridge the connection).
Java app: The Java app made uploading and managing music on Linux and MacOSX as well as Windows easy. A lot easier to download a Java app from the built-in web server than to pull out the install CD, run the install, reboot for every computer you want to upload files from (assuming it runs Windows).
Embedded Web Server: OK this one isn't really crucial to the player (it's really cool to show off) but it sure is convenient for downloading the Java app to control the unit. The web server had a lot of unrealised potential (e.g. adding a web interface to control the player) but the Rio developers never added that, and now they never will.
The Dock: The little marvel of a dock, included with all Karma's sold, was cool in its own right. Aesthetically it fits in with most stereo equipment better than the iPod and its dock. Not only does it have a 100Mb ethernet port, stereo RCA outputs, USB2.0 and power port, but it glows blue and flashes in time to the music!
So to say the Karma was ahead of its time is not entirely accurate. The Karma's time never arrived.
But they weren't first to market with a portable mp3 player!
There was a product called the Mp3Man put out by a South Korean company named Saehan. I worked for the US distributor of said product. I still have it in a box somewhere.
"It is as free for licensing as mp3 is. You do realize that mp3 also requires a license?"
a license that doesnt restrict me in any way (plenty of freeware mp3 encoders out there), and doesnt negatively impact the product at all, should not be used as evidence against it. i honestly dont get this ogg rocks! mentality here. Just last night i was watching an OGM file and while the quality was pretty much the exact same as divx, the sound fell off track multiple times. by the end of the 22 minutes (it was the daily show) the lips had about a 5 second lag on them. I have noticed that with full length movies recorded under that format as well.
As for music, i remember downloading mp3s off of BBS's in the early 90s. tried and true, plays on everything. for a brief time i even went thru a flirtation with VQF. then i realized that NO ONE USES VQF, and went back to mp3s. honestly i think sometimes people on this site just want to make things more difficult for themselves. i have never paid a cent to anyone for use of mp3 "licenses" and would love having someone explain to me why i should phe4r teh license!1!!1
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Actually Via handles the AAC licensing. There are several companies that benefit from those payments including dolby/thomson and fraunhofer to name a few.e nseFAQ.html
http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/lic
MPEGLA handles the MPEG4/AVC licensing.
If they sold their IP to the same company that produces the tech Apple is using, maybe Ogg playback and gapless playback will make it to the iPod?
Here's hoping...
nt
No, you still fail it. I checked.
It makes me think of the Playstation. Sony released its system after Sega's Dreamcast, and found themselves with a great success. Now Microsoft seems to be doing everything possible to be "first to market" with the next-gen console. Will MS be one of the lucky ones to win from being first, or one of the many to lose from being too quick to jump?
Wow, you really disproved the parent's point. Rio clearly closed their doors because they couldn't compete with the already establisehd MP3man.
There sure was a market. Apple created iTMS. The iPod was a late-arriving, me-too product with fancy packaging and a lot of marketing that created nothing. Apple benefited from XPlay's efforts to broaden its sales appeal. Prior to that iPods originally worked only with macs. Hardly a market-maker there.
Apple lovers are sure good with revisionist history.
I thought strongly about buying an EMpeg, and would have eventually if they had kept developing it. But it seemed to languish and so I dropped the idea.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Brand ryhmes with grande (in a Spanglish sort of way).
Truth is, Apple simply crushed them with superior development, product and marketing.
Several people mentioned Ogg as a counterargument, but that is a niche feature few want. If I had a $1 for every person who wanted Ogg, I'd still go broke. Good technology is not enough, it has to fill a hole in the marketplace.
A) Jamba Juice is everywhere.
B) it's "iPod".
Not many people care about iPod being 'cool'. People buy it because of Apple's marketing. It has mindshare. When you go to the store for an MP3 player, the first thing most people look at is an iPod, then compare everything to them. iPods look a million times better than most players out there and they're simple to use. THAT's why people use them. Get over yourself.
Then you should think harder there, sparky. Sony released the Playstation in 1994, and Sega released the Dreamcast in 1998.
I presume you're referring to the PS2, but that doesn't really apply so much because the products (games consoles per se) were already firmly established (PS1, N64, Saturn, to say nothing of earlier generations). Also, Sony engaged in a massive spoiler campaign against the Dreamcast*. Then again, expect to see more of that re: the Xbox 360 and PS3.
* It could be argued that Sega also did the same - but against their own product :-)
if you can get there first, you'll get mindshare
What I recall from examples I've read (hmm.. from Don Norman's The Invisible Computer?), was that all of the prime examples of first mover's advantage were from stable, commoditized markets. But strategic marketing, or strategy of any kind, seemed rather irrelevant to much of the 90's VC-money-powered mindset.
i have had my 20gb iPod for almost 5 years now and have never had to replace the battery. in fact, it still gives me 6-7 hours of reliable playback. so i havent even spent $1 on batteries for it...
also, i now have linux installed as the default OS instead of the appleOS. makes a huge difference, and now i can play chess and tetris on it....
Also, we bought my sister an iPod Shuffle for her birthday back in Feb, and it's dead now. I'm guessing it's battery, good thing it's under warranty.
yeah, that is what warranties are for...
AAC is not a closed format, also DRM is not required.
I don't give a damn how a player looks.
I bought an iPod for the UI, period. It could have looked like a spike-filled frozen turkey turning moldy and I still would have bought it.
I actually feel embarassed I own something that looks "trendy" as you say, but I'll suffer for well-designed UI any day.
Having briefly used a Karma I actually cannot fully understand what part of uisng that device you consider superiour to the iPod. I do of course only use my device to play music and perhaps there's some additional feature you make use of I would have no use for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The iPod does support "Apple Lossless" now. I don't particularily care if I rip FLAC or Apple Lossless, just as long as it's a lossless format.
Vorbis support I still wouldn't mind, who knows perhaps we'll see it added someday. In the meantime I can live without.
I'm personally not sure I would like gapless but who knows, that could be a really nice feature I'm missing. I prefer more of a cross-fade I think as I like transitions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If oil prices get to the point where computer equipment gets prohibitive - here's a news flash for you - you're not going to be worrying about a $1500 iPod, you're going to be worrying about not starving to death, freezing, or being killed by a roving mob.
People amaze me. Disposable computing, indeed.
Go recycle some paper and compost some peels. That'll help. Not.
..don't panic
I really hate having to throw out batteries, I like the rechargability of the iPod in that regard. I just have a simple cord that basically converts the lighter feed into power for the iPod, you don't have to get a whole power inverter just to charge.
Plus for most road trips the iPod will last long enough even without charging. Even multi-day trips it can hold up most of the way without charging.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The... trash can? Boo hoo environment.
My point is that my Rio works fine after that many years, and I used it a lot for the first year that I had it.
The power usage is minimal, it hasn't stopped working due to some design flaw, and the only thing I might want to do is get a fresh battery at some point.
They built well.
But disposable electronics is something that all advanced societies need to deal with, as we see in that recent Robots! movie. Disposable societies without recycling and reuse inherently are unstable and run up against a brick wall - sometimes literally.
Doing a case mod of an old MacSE is better than tossing it in the river - those things have mercury and other heavy metals in them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There's a reason it isn't called Riocasting ...
iPod is the walkman of the '00s. Other players will catch up by the end of the decade though, and then it will turn into a market like '90s walkman clones. The marketplace will still be defined by the term iPod though.
Um, what's a walkman? Is that some kind of pedometer?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The average computer uses as much as two circus tents worth of coal to run on any given day.
No it doesn't.
Imagine the heat given off by burning a coal fire. Now imagine how much more heat is given off by a circus tent's worth of coal. Sure, modern computers get hot, but not hot enough to incinerate the neighbourhood!
Given that the energy used by a computer ends up as heat, anyone with basic cognitive skills ought to realise that a computer uses nowhere near one circus tent worth of coal, let alone two.
Then again, Sheetrock has previously claimed that a computer requires "seventeen swimming pools worth of coal" to run for a day. He's either a troll or, more likely, a clown.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Read my comment more closely. I said a substantial market. Apple took what was a floundering market and packaged it all in a way that made sense and they ran with it.
Apple lovers are sure good with revisionist history.
So are Apple haters. And for the record, I'm not an "Apple lover." I just have a good enough memory to recall that prior to iTunes there were a few half-assed attempts at doing online music sales along with a mishmash of hardware that was confusing to the average user. Apple pulled it all together in a few simple, inter-working products. That's their forte. No surprise. And it worked and continues to work. There is no revisionism here.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
... Yes, Sigmatel bought the IP, but if you look at the articles it appears they also bought the entire Rio design team - which the Sigmatel press release implies will remain untouched. Surely that's a very interesting decision if they were only after the IP ;)
IMO the reason the iPod is now the market leader has very little to do with technical superiority (it's good but far from perfect IMO), and a great deal to do with very clever marketing - and large horde of Apple zealots...
"Not many people care about iPod being 'cool'. People buy it because of Apple's marketing. It has mindshare. When you go to the store for an MP3 player, the first thing most people look at is an iPod, then compare everything to them. iPods look a million times better than most players out there and they're simple to use. THAT's why people use them. Get over yourself.
"
Slashdot geeks might do this, but I highly doubt that the majority of people who buy an Ipod or Ipod Mini do their research on the portable audio market. People DO just buy it because it's "cool" and advertises heavily.
"A) Jamba Juice is everywhere."
Jamba Juice is NOT everywhere. Obviously you have not been all over the country.
s/rio\ brand/rio\ brande
I like music
Palm missed their big opportunity to buy out a like-mindedly ineffective company.
I find the scroll wheel very quick for large lists, and the myriad paths I can take to reach a song means I almost am never traverseing very deeping. I frankly cannot imagine how the Karma could be quicker in that regard if you have a lot of music; for the task of browsing music it seemed slow to me.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I actually notice no difference listening to CD or songs transferred to the iPod...
Except I will admit there are some cases where the music is harmoneously set to blend from one track to the next on an album (can't think of an example). I had forgotten about that but I could see in those instances gapless would be nice because the music was meant to go together and I agree it's jarring to have it roughly end.
Mostly don't CD tracks have a built-in fade or have a small period of silence on normal CD's?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
maybe it was the first flash player, but they are crap anyway. the first mp3 player witha harddrive was the pjb 100 from hango. it started in compaq labs, didnt get made for fear of being sued, was licensed to hango a pacific rim manufacturer that couldnt give a hoot about lawsuits or the riaa.
it retailed for 3 grand at first, but was loaded with features. it cam out 2 or 3 years before the first ipod, had a 20 gig hard drive, 12 hour baterlife, usb (there was no firewire or usb 2 back then) and NO copyprotection of any kind.
it came with a case and free lifetime koss headphones.
this was the first truly good mp3 player. and there should be no patents on it. what would the patent say? a box that plays mp3's? uses a hard disk? these are hardly inventions. I cant imagine what patents rio might have, since the box was invented long ago. good riddance to those bozos, one day you think you are hot shit in a tech company, the next you are just some shmuck working in a box factory.
And yes the ipod owned them, and just about every other protable mp3 player by re-inventing (and patenting) the wheel. like it or not, welcome to america.
He's trolling - he's posted the same things in other threads, and gotten called on the bad math there, too. He keeps getting the Insightfuls, though.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
Apple really pulled a big one with the batteries. Just today it was announced that Apple would have to supply iPod owners whose batteries have failed, with replacements. If you ask me, making the battery integral part of the hardware wasn't a very good idea...battery go dead, iPod go dead. The only way to legitimately fix it is to get a new iPod.
After reading a lot of comments, I have come to the conclusion that this is really only of importance to non-mac users. There is an awful lot of energy spent decrying the iPod in favor of the karma or other players, but I think the division is between people without macs and people with.
If you own a Mac and an iPod, it is, undoubtedly, the best player for that platform. It works seemlessly with Mac both as a music player and a removeable disk. I think the disappointment really speaks to the fact that mos players for other formats a) suck and b) don't work very seemelessly in windows.
Good technology is not enough, it has to fill a hole in the marketplace.
Not having a dumb name helps, too.
... would a guy saying "two circus tents worth of coal" get taken seriously and then subsequently told off by the power of hard circus-tent maths.
Ugh. Well, alright, your heart is in the right place.
AAC isn't owned by anyone in particular. It's an MPEG (thus also ISO/IEC) standard. Technology in AAC is owned by many companies, among them Dolby, FhG, RCA, and Coding Technologies in a recent extension. It is true that anyone can license it, of course.
Frankly if they are going into music distribution they are going to have to beat Sonos which has a great product that is near perfect as well. SliMP3 open-source snobs may scoff at the closed nature and its limitations, but frankly it is a superior device at this point in time. I think there are plenty of choices out there already in both markets and frankly you have to be damn innovative and aggressive to come out with something truly powerful and compelling.
You know, you expect when somebody is closing their doors, ending, shutting down, they might approach it with a bit of honesty, humility and above all, coming to human terms with the whole thing. Who writes this stuff? This guy's quote in the slashdot article reads like the worst market speak I've ever heard. It's almost like a joke the way it's explained. English please! I think the Rio company might be run by aliens.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Obviously if you had $1 for every person who wanted Ogg you'd go broke. They were getting over $200 from the people who wanted Ogg, and still went broke.
Extra, extra! Read all about it! Don't buy extended warranties, especially if the company could go down before you claim them!
Oh, sure, its very pretty... but the usability on my wife's Mini just gives me a headache.
The slider wheel thats not really a wheel is simply not as intuative as, say, buttons, and it overly succeptable to accedental brushing. But the biggest problem I find is the lack of an off button. Instead, you have to hit the slider in just the right way for the correct period of time.... you can do it, but its totally not intuative and it takes more practice than it should. How hard would it be to have a simple "on/off" button?
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
> what would the patent say? a box that plays mp3's? uses a hard disk? these are hardly inventions.
And don't even get me started on those stupid "auto-mobiles", which are clearly a rip-off of the horse-and-cart.
And tell me why the "tele-phone" counts as an invention, when shouting really loud is so intuitive?
- Compact: smaller than a casette tape, truly pocket-sized
- Simple, backlit LCD, capable of displaying two lines of text (or about three in a tiny font)
- Great battery life
- Very durable
- Simple interface, capable of managing settings, albums, and playback with just a scroll-and-click wheel.
Sure, you can find various combinations of these features in various different players, but if there's one out there with all of those features (and without all sorts of expensive, irrelevant bells and whistles), it's flying beneath my radar. There are plenty of players out there that go well beyond these features, but I don't want to pay an extra $100 for a high-res, color LCD, when all I need it to do is display ID3 information.If only my Rio had a) continued to work after four years of abuse, b) had more storage, and c) had a built-in rechargeable battery, I'd still be using it.
Steven N. Severinghaus
You're close, but a bit off in how S3 and DiamondMM became one. It wasn't Diamond who bought S3, it was S3 who bought Diamond, a deal that was far better for S3 than for Diamond.
They got the size right (1.8" HD's not 3.5")
They got the bus right (firewire not USB1)
They got the interface right (you don't have to be 13 to figure it out)
They got the name right (it's not the ZX-23)
They got the jukebox right (iTunes is good, free, dual platform)
They got the format right (MP3 first and foremost)
They got the store right (ITMS is comprehensive, easy to use, and you get 2 free songs a week)
They got the DRM right (unobtrusive enough to not bug average consumer)
They got the expandability right (what other player has the breadth of 3d party add-ons? These companies are also trying to sell you an iPod)
They even got the price right. (The iPod shuffle succeeded initially by undercutting the other Flash players on price. Even the HD players are not the most expensive on the market.)
They got the marketing right (basically every celeb on the planet gushing about how much they love their iPods)
Everyone underestimates both the importance and the difficulty of getting all of the above right. Until they do, expect more casualties.
Too bad, since the Rio Karma is still the best disk-based player on the market, by far.
I was hoping to abuse my Best Buy replacement plan to get this when it hit the market. But now I'm either going to have to either upgrade to an iRiver or kiss the $30 I spent for the replacement plan goodbye. Sigh.
p.s. Yes, I have no qualms about screwing Best Buy.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Largely speaking, it was the MP3 equivalent of the Betamax case, and the RIAA lost in 1999 after it was ruled that the PMP300 was an audio playback device and not a recording device, meaning it was allowed to exist as-was under fair use and the precedent of the Betamax case. Diamond/Rio may have never made the breakaway device that solidified the market like the iPod, but as they were willing to stand up to the RIAA and fight for user rights(and admittedly a nice profit), it's a shame to see the company finally wind down.
"...usb (there was no firewire or usb 2 back then)..."
There most certainly was firewire "back then". Firewire was invented in the 80s and IEEE certified it as a standard in 1995.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
The Karma was a good unit, usability-wise. They were horribly unreliable, but I'll let that slide.
As to your comments:
The line out was nothing special. 97dB wasn't even unusual at the time. You can get that much through the headphone jack on other units. I'm not saying it sounded bad, but it didn't sound any better than anythine else.
100MBps ethernet port. Well, it was a 10/100 NIC in there, and the 100mbps light would light up on my hub. But the throughput was AWFUL on the Karma. I remember measuring it at 6 mbps or so. It was nice to be able to dock it and sync with your computer across the room (in another room in my case) but if you wanted to move a reasonable number of files, you had to put it on USB 2.0 to get it done.
The Java app was horrible. Unbelieveably slow on my Mac OS X machine. I mean astounding. Like serial speeds. And the UI was pretty, but pretty odd too. Also you could select a lot of songs to add to your library at once IIRC. A decent effort, and I liked how it was on the unit for download. But it was symbolic more than anything.
The glowing was fun. I found the flashing annoying.
All in all, really it was the first iPod killer. But it was expensive ($100 more than an iPod retail) and unreliable. Still, if more people had looked at it, more might have bought it and forced Apple to add a few of these features.
A great effort. Honestly, when Rio did that well so long ago and nobody noticed, perhaps they should have stopped and realized it would be difficult to top that technically and threw in the towel sooner. They really couldn't match the iPod marketing.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Apple is coming down from the high end, crushing all before it.
Meanwhile,at the low end flash based MP3 players are disposable. You can get a player that takes SD cards for £10, and 512Mb SD cards for £20.
Or, if that's too fiddly to give your kids, my local supermarket has basic MP3 flash players for £20.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Perhaps I'm not aware of what a 'case mod' is, but you are aware that the 'bad' things in a computer are almost exclusively on the circuitry, right?
That the case itself is just steel and possibly some plastic? It's like throwing away file cabinets.
Maybe the power supply has some toxic stuff in, but that's about it.
(And don't fall for the 'recycling plastic' lie. Recycling plastic uses more oil and creates more pollution than just throwing it away.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I use all kinds of rechargeables for my DSLR. However I do find very annoying the need to bring along other batteries and chargers.
If the iPod took rechargables I'd have to bring a seperate charger, and extra pair of batteries. I'm already lugging a hell of a lot of cords and batteries so I'd rather just charge the iPod.
Now if I were using the iPod well away from power for a long time, then I can understand wanting a more replacable battery. I have a portable storage unit for pictures that uses a custom battery, for which I have a spare when the other dies. But that speaks more to the piss-poor battery life of my rechargable storage unit than it does to the desirability of rechargable batteries. If it held up as long as the P2000 is supposed to, for instance, I could do without.
It just seems to me that most iPod users are not often more than ten hours between power sources. And if you are just sometimes (like on a trip through africa) you just get a power pack that does take real batteries - problem solved.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Amazing how stupid the American people is." I blame government education for that one.
I have the X5 and both the audio playback quality and the physical manufacturing quality of the unit itself are superlative. The Karma does have sound playback quality just about equivalent to the X5's, but the build quality of that unit seems much more cheap and fragile. Read more about Cowon's offerings at www.iaudiophile.net .
See links
p /t-2975.htmlt ml
http://forums.designtechnica.com/archive/index.ph
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/sep/08ipod.h
It was not cheaper than a 20GB iPod on day one, which is when I got mine. I know it came down in price after a while. I don't know where I got the idea that it was $100 more than an iPod. Maybe I got confused as to the hard drive sizes. I think with less cachet, bad software, and being bigger than an iPod, it's tough to justify that price in my mind.
By the time the price came down, the word was out, they just weren't reliable. And so they didn't sell well. See the other people's reviews on here. See reviews on cnet shopper. See nearly anywhere.
I did miss one thing in my comments. There is a difference in the line out on the Karma. It has better stereo separation than a headphone out has. That can be pretty significant.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I had a local shop ordering one of the first PMP300. When I came to pick it up, the guys in the shop were like in a frenzy and asked me whether I could "demonstrate" them this new tiny player. It took me an hour to leave the shop, but they gave me some goodies with it.
Like other early adopters mentionned, mine is still perfectly working, despite about 1'000 kilometers I have jogged with it, through heat and snow.
I have replaced it later with a larger Rio/Nike Psa Play that I am still using for jogging now.
So this is a sad day, for Rio was a very innovative company, unfortunately without the marketing war machine that an Apple can use to promote its products.
Of course all this was many years before Apple "invented" the portable music player.
We now know that, back in the bubble, the real reason venture capitalists wnated to be first in a market was so they could flip an IPO before everyone realized their business plan was a loser.
If it's that consistent then you realise that the audio problem is most likely in your decoder?
I had a Rio PMP-300 way back. 32Mb of flash memory and a parallel port interface that took ages to transfer music to. Lovely little piece of kit, though.
Recently I got a Rio Carbon Pearl, which I'm also very pleased with.
I think Rio's biggest problem was that they hardly did any marketing. They were never going to be able to seriously compete with the larger companies when nobody actually heard about their products.
Can you intelligently discuss the pros and cons of the iPod as compared to its competitors?
Or do you just hate iPods because they are popular?
Has any one tried to assemble their own portable Mp3/Music player?Any idea what would it take?
Wanted : A Signature.
The new car radio units sporting
DVD MP3 playback kills iPods in cars...
About 4 GB per DVD disk, you'll drive a long distance before you run out of tunes...
Measure it. In volume, IIRC, it is something like 40% larger than the equivalent iPod of the day. It is very well shaped, so it doesn't seem large, but it is. In other words, it hides its girth well. But it is really thick,
m ensions.pdf
It was (IIRC) bigger than the thick iPods of the day, and you understand that the 20GB of the day was one of the thin ones, right?
Let me do a little searching. The dimensions of the Karma is (consensus, I averaged a bit) are 3"x2.7"x1.1". Do that's 76.2mm x 69mm x 27.9mm. This is a volume of 146,692mm^3.
Now look at the iPod dimensions:
http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ipod/3GiPoddi
The 20G is a thin one (the 10-15G in the diagram was outdated.)
So the iPod is 103.5mm x 61.8mm x 15.7mm. That's 100,421.91mm^3.
The 20G Karma was over 33% larger than a 20G iPod at the time.
The thick iPods (40G) at the time were 119,610.81mm^3. The Karma is still 10% bigger than those too.
(Note, if you redo my math, you'll see I used a bit different numbers. These calculations are calculating volume by 3-dimensions, but that corner protruding from the Karma means that one dimension, the 3.0" one is inflated and thus the volumes are overstated perhaps 5%, so I cut them down a bit in my % comparisons.)
Like I said, it hid its size well. Looking at it, you wouldn't notice, because it was mostly depth. But it was rather large.
You could have perhaps found these figures yourself before you insinuated I was a bald-faced liar.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
with a USB interface and MP3 player built-in? I am sure this comes no where near all the cool stuff a real computer could do, but for just playing music, they are hard to beat. My new truck came with an el-cheapo radio/cd player, so I went out and found one of these things on clearance at a local retailer (I think it was $29.99 or thereabouts.) The form factor is nice: you just plug it into your cigarette lighter/12V DC power socket, then put a USB dongle in the slot and presto, instant MP3 player in your vehicle.
You sir are a troll, simply because you can't even type iPod correctly after being corrected. If you think people buy them because they're cool, you must be a teenager. Grandparent had it correct: MINDSHARE. That's from advertising. People may be sheep and buy into it, but they're not doing it because they're trying to be "COOL", they're doing it because they think they will find it useful. Learn to tell the difference between influence and poseur attitudes.
Oh and I noticed his/her JJ reference. It may not be everywhere, but it's not uncommon either. It's also not "cool". I live in LA, and no one here talks about JJ like it's some sort of really cool trend. It's a goddamn store, you know, like McDonald's?
I bought my Rio Karma 18 months ago, and I love it. The scroll wheel broke and I fixed it. The LCD broke and I got a broken Karma from ebay, and replaced the LCD. I bought another one for my wife and she loved it.
The main reasons I bought a Karma instead of an ipod were: longer battery duration, Ogg Vorbis, and price. Besides ipod scroll wheel, I don't really like the design of the iPod. It looks like a box of Tampax.
My bad - I was talking about MP3. Thanks for the link anyway.
Not when it was released.
e rs/rio/PRD_173483_5548crx.aspx
Just search. There's plenty of places that still list the initial MSRP.
http://www.audioreview.com/cat/portables/mp3-play
I do understand it dropped later, but so did the price of 20G iPods.
Also, "estimated street price" is used by companies to indicate sell prices below MSRP, because they expect discounting. It isn't used to indicate prices above MSRP.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95