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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."
"Looks" are subjective. For me the iPod is ugly. Furthermore I found Rio Forge far more practical (for me) then any iPod. You are projecting your own personal preferences on everyone else. iPod is the "winner" and consumers are losers because of the sad success of marketing hoopla and hype coming from Apple combined with big-box sales system over our plain consumer choice. Apple managed to make people believe that owning an iPod is a "status" or "fashion" symbol. At one time cigarettes held that dubious distinction. And bell-bottoms at another. So today its iPod and thy name is Lemming.
If you are going to deny the power of marketing hype over everything else in Western consumer society, then there is very little I can do to enlighten you. Perhaps you noticed that the arguments for the iPod here (along with emotional reponses of modding contrary opinions "flamebait") are mostly based on "Kewl looks, man!", "we pwn j00s Azz!" etc, and somehow very few seem to be listing and contrasting the technical features of Rios vs iPods.
You missed the point. It is my personal impression of iPod "system". The parent/grand-parent posters treat this like it is a winner-takes-all game and the iPod was the obvious unquestionable "winner" because ... well because ... "we pwn j00!" .. or something like it. I merely emphasized the fact that other people have other preferences and that hailing a "victory" by one brand while considering a mono-culture and lack of consumer choice to be a good thing is brainless. Some apparently took exception to that.
But, you're seeing it the wrong way, people wanted iTunes because it is elegant and easy to use, and it worked exceptionally well with the iPod, which also had a great interface that was easy and relatively intuitive to most people.
Again this is highly subjective. Rios were MP3 players. iPods are "lifestyle/way of doing things/packaged service/software/hardware suite". I can see some might like that kind of thing but it is by no means the only choice. I prefer my MP3 players to be actual players and do not require additional software. I want them to be standard USB storage devices which work on any USB enabled system. And i have no use for iTunes.
As for HDD over Flash, lots of people wanted to store large (5GB+) amounts of music and Flash hasn't gotten there; yet.
True but then some prefer not to have mechanical drives in their MP3 players. Again a matter of choice, one of such choices which are slowly diminishing with the "victories" of iPod monoculture.
And, there are lots of people who don't see FAT-formatted SD cards as an advantage, but yet another thing to buy, break, lose.
This is a red herring, one does not buy an expandable MP3 player if one has no use for expansion cards. FAT is the only system which is universally readable/writeable by all OSs.
And, I'm not sure why you care what files are named, it's the meta-data that counts.
That is because I keep them organized in the file system not in some iTunes monstrosity.
The Rio Karma and Forge were good products, but the iPod was better and has kept getting better
No these were merely different, something which seems iPod users cannot stand.
Stop acting as if every iPod owner is the victim of 'brainless hype and marketing'
Thei iPod lover's behaviour suggests many of them are
and accept that Rio failed to bring to market a player that had a great feature set, a great interface,
False
Bingo. The masses want yet another lock-in subscription service to be addicted to. We were talking about lemmings, were we not?
Face it, Rio got flanked on almost every front.
On the subscription/DRM crapola front they did get creamed. Too bad I have no use for any of it.
And technology was definitely a place that Rio lost.
Really? How so? Shorter battery life? Lower sound quality? Inability to play/shuffle/reorganize storage? Lack of expansion options? Name it, I seem to have trouble seeing what do you mean. Unless of course you were referring to the "personalized faceplates in 207 colours!" and Guci carrying cases.
May I point out to you that it is the grand-parent poster here with "iPod pwn3d the world!" or some such, not me. I can understand people who like iTunes and think iPod is best for them. But just listen to yourself: "and it is a better solution for most people". If that does not scream "kool-aid drinker" I am not sure what would. You are in no position to speak for "most people". "Most people" are technology illiterate and are perpetual victims of ads-driven brainwashing, brand worship and similar gems of consumerism in any field. That is how you get multi-national corporations making billions of dollars by "manufacturing" brand-name beef patties on a bun.