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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."
Sadly I don't think creative's going to die terribly soon. They sadly still do sell some to unsuspecting people. Someone I know recently got a crappy Zen micro thingy, he was like... yah I know it's not as good as an iPod but it was cheap. I just shook my head and was reminded yet again how happy I am that I have a 4 gig mini.
...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!"
I bought my riocar empeg because of easy expandability. It's just a StrongArm running Linux, and I still haven't used the 2nd laptop drive bay (I have a single 40GB drive in there now).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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
I would put my Karma up against any iPod, any day. The only thing the iPod had over the Karma was looks. ... The iPud wins on better marketing and sexier wrapping paper.
The thing is, most of the iPod detractors don't seem to figure in the user interface. I've tried all the different devices at Best Buy and any other retailer that has them out to play with. I pretty much concluded that most, if not all of the competitors are quite a bit more clumsy in the UI department than they need to be. I realize that there is a matter of personal preferences here but the operation and button layout often didn't seem to be as intuitive as it should be.
The above statements don't apply to shuffle though. My sister has one, and the slider switch is poorly thought out, and I do occasionally want to know what the song name is, etc.
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.
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.
I take issue with the "product" part of that sentence. I would put my Karma up against any iPod, any day. The only thing the iPod had over the Karma was looks. In every other way, the Karma is the superior product. Just like Windows, the iPud wins on better marketing and sexier wrapping paper. *sigh*
I looked at a lot of options when I was trying to come up with a system to play mp3s in my car and I ended up with an iPod. The adapter I bought allows me to plug my iPod into the CD changer controls on my original head unit. I can easily skip around my playlist and the iPod turns off automatically when I put in a CD or switch to radio.
The most valuable asset of the iPod is its interface... not just it's GUI but the little connector that you can plug all manner of things into. The superiority of the iPod is quickly coming from not just what it can do but also what it can be made to do.
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?
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
I am interested in Rockbox, but until it implements the features I want (and if you notice, recording is one of them) it's no good to me. Believe it or not, I use the recording feature for work.
Breakfast served all day!