Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New portable MP3 player from RCA

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the future-of-tunes dept.

deicide wrote in to send us a link to MP3.com and this story about RCA's new MP3 Player. Its called 'Lyra', and it is nice looking, and while it only holds 32 megs, it accepts external storage of up to 340 megs.

3 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. External Storage by Signal+11 · · Score: 3

    Only two questions for the hardware geeks out there - can this new portable have it's memory upgraded, and if so - what's the type of memory it takes?

    Second question - how long until somebody creates an interface for exchanging data between mp3 players? I'd like to hook a Rio up to a Lyra (or whatever), and exchange data with it. Feasible?



    --

  2. Nah, other way around by Fizgig · · Score: 3

    The rate at which memory prices fall is going to be a LOT faster than the rate at which compression algorithms get better. MP4 will be at best twice as good at compressing music as MP3 (and you can only compress things so far before you have no information left), but portable storage prices are going to drop much more than that, especially with the portable MP3 players and digital cameras driving demand. AMD announced earlier that by next year they'll have Flash RAM at $1/MB and IBM has those itsy-bitsy hard-drives we all want. Adding more processing power isn't going to bring as much of an advantage as adding more storage.

  3. Kinda intrseting by digitaldaniel · · Score: 3

    "From a product planning standpoint we had to
    we've looked out there to see what's going on withDiamond's player and others and it became clear to us that there were at least the beginnings of a market. As participants in audio hardware for the past 40-50 years, this is a read we didn't want to miss and one that we
    actually felt we could lead to a certain extent."

    It's intresting to note that its seem like many of the corporate decision makers are taking the leap of faith into this market. They, in some senses, are blindly following the "hype" more then prattical business research. I would hope this will lead to a large market of mp3 players, if only to reduce their cost.

    I for one like the idea of holding 340+ megs of mp3, especially because still its only an option, that you can still get more or less storage depending on how much $ your willing to spend.

    Choices are good.