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PDA+MP3 Player
cheeze wrote in to
send us a link to another mp3 player
that is actually a PDA that uses those Iomega Clik! disks for
storage. Came from the-gadgeteer.com..
Is anyone besides me thinking that devices like the Rio's are
dead ends, and that the real future is something like a Pilot,
but with good sound output and memory? Palm VII's can stream,
if it was cheap and had sound, shoutcast or the like would allow
us to create personal radio stations really easily. Ok, not for
a few years, but its beginning to seem inevitable.
Seems to me, even the technology nowadays allow us to have a real PDA instead of those toys we have now. Why don't we have it now?
How about a PDA that can
1. Organising informational documents
2. Internet communications (email + www of course, and more... audio/video stream... a portable Radio and TV...)
3. Phone service (voice over IP, please, not the other way)
4. MP3 Music on tiny storage device (how about those micro-hard-drive from IBM?) Don't have to bring that bunch CDs with me on the road.
5. Infra-red communication (that control your garage doors, your cars, your VCR, etc.)
Of course, as small as the mobile phone nowadays. No stupid keyboard like those CE-based thing, but a little bit more buttons for easier programmed controls over things that I would like if Palm had it.
A sig is redundant.
But I don't want a Palm Pilot, I don't want a Rio, I don't want any of the one-trick gadgets on the market today.
What I want is a portable gadget with wireless 'net access, a built in cell phone (preferably embedded in the PPP stream so I don't have to log out to call someone), sound quality good enough to play MP3s, image quality good enough to run snes9x (even if only in black & white), CPU speed to do both, hardware open enough to run Linux on, a 10baseT port instead of some stupid serial-based "cradle" for uplinks, a set of long-life, built in rechargeable batteries, a fold-out keyboard, a stylus, and a couple PCMCIA slots. (an optional PCMCIA-sized GPS receiver or 4 GB drive would be nice too) Oh, and *lots* of RAM. At a dollar a meg, putting 32 or 64MB RAM into a handheld device isn't ridiculous. I don't know what default software should be included, but at the very least I should be able to look at the bundled math program and throw away my TI-85 (or install Linux/matlab and throw away my TI-85).
This would probably cost over a thousand dollars and require daily recharging with moderate use today, but it is possible, and those numbers are only getting rapidly better. I guarantee the first company to replace the PDA, pager, cell phone, game boy, walkman, calculator, GPS receiver, etc. with one single unit, and make it affordable, will be rich overnight.
Heh. I'm really wary of iomega stuff nowadays. After my jaz drive crashed (and took out everything on one of the carts)... I found the Iomega Click Of Death page. My experience isn't unusual (a friend of mine had a jaz that crashed). Zips are useful for sneakernet purposes only (any sort of useful "need-it-or-die" information [presentations, etc] tend to make the zip die at the worst possible time).
m
Some URLs:
Iomega Click of death page (host was down when checked...)
http://www.thirdeyesp.com/jatin/iomega/index.ht
Trouble in paradise can be found at www.grc.com (windoze program for iomega drives).
There are at least 2 C compilers (more accurately: cross-compilers) but you don't want to use them. The code is bloated and slow, which is especially bad on a machine with only 96k free ram (which can't all be used at once) and a 6 mhz chip.
For the compilers, try these:
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/tcc.zip
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/tisco.zip
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/zcc_16.zip
and just browse around the directory to see what else you can find:
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/
But Z80 assembly isn't very hard to learn and it's kinda fun when you get used to it.
Well, considering Iomega's financial shape these days, using Clik! disks as their primary media may be an even larger mistake than picking up a Rio. :) At least with a Rio, you're guaranteed of at least having something to store your MP3's on..The whole idea of putting your data on something mechanical also introduces a nasty number of problems in a design..heads go bad, disks go bad, and you go through batteries like crazy. The best MP3 player will be one with ample storage, no moving parts and a geek port for future expansion. Not a glorified cassette player. :)
Bowie J. Poag
People like the PalmPilots not because they are technically superior but because they work well. They are handy, easy-to-use, and fairly powerful for what they are designed for.
WinCE is not nearly as good of an environment for a PDA as PalmOS is.
And, as mentioned above, the Palm series gets long battery life -- which is one reason why I'm getting a PV this summer and NOT a WinCE machine.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
The Casio E-100 has 32M, a color 320x200 display, and plays MP3/MPG (yes MPG!) files:
http://www.casio.com/hpc/
I have a Rio (SE + 32MB). I like that it just plays music. I have a mobile phone. I like that it's good at phone calls. It's cute that I can set alarms on it, and apart from wanting someway to hear it when I'm listening to my Rio, these two units don't need to be merged.
Anyway, the combined price of the two units would be somewhere around, lets see, US$1,300 - and things only get more expensive when they're converged.
P.S. moving parts == bad. solid state == good. 96MB should be enough for a while...
Kris
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
Am I the only one who doesn't want an All-In-Wonder monster device? I don't want to take my sub$1000 dollar cellphone/organizer/mp3player/virtual pet with me when I want to go jogging, or if I want to lend it to a friend for an afternoon to check out some new songs.
Plus given the delta of change with all the various portable mediums, upgrading would be a nightmare.
i see no mention of anything on Varo's site that checks to see if the mp3s are legal.
meaning the Varovision people have decided not to play lackey to the RIAA, and not to fear the RIAA's empty threats. we should all be proud of Varo, even those of us who have no intention of buying their products.
as for me, i'm just going to sit here and wait for someone to make an MP3 player app for the TI-86. Hey, it could happen! There's already TI software that lets you hook up headphones to the graphlink port.. -_-
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Listen, I'm not going to claim I go jogging with my Rio. Truth is, I am as lethargic as your typical /. reader. But I also don't own a car (why waste money on one? Less toys) so I do a lot of walking to bus stops. The Rio's lack of moving parts is perfect for that.
Sure, I'd also love a portable CD player that could read MP3s. That would be perfect for car use (if I owned one).
My motto: The right tool for the right job
Anyway, the future of computing is not smaller and faster hard drives. It's NO hard drives and no moving parts. A 100% "solid state" beast. We're not there yet, but getting there. My office computer has 10x as much RAM as my first office computer had hard drive space (256 megs/20 megs). (It also ran DOS 2.1 but I digress!)
From what I can tell, the Lyra, a new MP3 player from RCA seems like a much better idea than the varoman plus. It can accept CompactFlash memory cards (type I or II) but the real benefit is that the upcoming IBM microdrive fits into a CompactFlash socket. That's right: 340 mb of MP3's that can fit in your pocket. And the drive will only cost a few hundred dollars, much less than the equivalent amount in solid state cards. The only problem may be skipping. It depends on how well IBM makes their microdrive.
For more information, see:
http://www.mp3.com/news/239.html
AFAIK, this thing won't be available until the end of the year, and the microdirve later than that, so it's a long time to wait, but it looks like the Lyra has the best technology.
The Lyra also can be upgraded to play other audio formats which could be useful 10 years later when MP3 is not in use anymore.
Am I the only person who feels that anything that manufacturers try to squish between PDA and Notebook size is just DUMB?
:P).
A PDA is the perfect size for what it does, and thats ALL it does. I have a Palm IIIx, I LOVE it. It is great for taking memos, keeping track of my calendar, even keeping email on if I need to reference it. Not only that there are a few good games on it for when I'm bored. But in general, I don't use it for long periods of time or for huge amounts of text input.
A notebook is larger, and therefore not as useful while you are walking around unless you have time to sit down, but is much different than a PDA. I wouldn't use a PDA as a notebook, and by the same token I wouldn't use a notebook as a PDA. The notebook (mine is a whopping 486/66 w/8mb of ram running Slackware) is for large amounts of text entry, messing around, even working on programming (compiling is a bit slow!
These two devices serve completely DIFFERENT functions. When you try for the "subnotebook" class, where you're aiming for something similar in size to a PDA but with the power of a Notebook, you get a MONSTROSITY. They have TINY KEYBOARDS, and really not enough HD space to do what a notebook can. They basically turn into hard to use PDAs without text recognition and a really really bad keyboard.
I like expensive toys as much as the next guy, but really, subnotebooks are just plain useless and expensive. I really don't see a need for streaming mp3 audio on a Palm Pilot, nor do I see a need for an all-in-one wonder gadget that does everything but your taxes. People need to acknowledge that having a piece of hardware designed for ONE thing can be a Good Thing (tm). Trying to make it do everything will do nothing but give it the ability to mimic the abilities of about 10 other devices BADLY.
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
I had been looking at the Casio pda as a possible replacement for carrying both a palm V and an mp3 player. The hardware for wince machines seems to be pretty nice, but I really dislike wince. Does anyone know if there are any other practical alternatives? I've seen the custom projects for Linux and NetBSD on the dragonball based machines, but I don't have the free time to try a full port myself. Perhaps eCos?
Yes, CE-based palm-top computer with a mobile phone can pretty much do the "advanced" idea many slashdotters have, but this device is a total failure in my opinion.
I once saw a guy next to me on a flight typing on a Toshiba libretto, it's really funny to find that his fingertips are much larger than the keys.
Indeed, if you want those powerful function, get a slim notebook computer will do. What's special is if there's a device with a remote-control size, or mobile phone size, that can do the job of providing instant informations (by email/www/internet radio or video/voice over IP) and simple communication with other devices thru Infra-red and provide simple entertainments when it's idle. CE-based device could do this kind of thing, but it's simply too complex (trying to put a PC on that size is stupid). Just like I don't why we need to put a Pentium processor in a rice cooker, I don't see why we need a condensed computer functions in such a device? Of course, if in the future, when the user-interface can be integrated seamlessly with us, I may want this small device that can dictate a business presentation documents just like I talk to my sec. Now, I just need a mobile phone with some practical function.
the idea of CE is just as bloat as all other M$ products.
A sig is redundant.
Well, there's basically a tradeoff between the price of the storage medium and the quality/durability of it. Memory sticks and other solid-state storage devices are nearly invincible (except to various form of ESD/etc), but they become incredibly expensive in the range of sizes needed to store MP3 files (64-128MB). Mechanical magneto and optical storage devices are vulterable to such things as magnetic fields, physical wear, dust, scratching and contact with the user, but obtaining a 100-150MB of storage on one is trivial and relatively cheap (compared to memory).
I'm willing to risk the integrity of my data for a cheaper storage solution, as I will probably have it backed up somewhere. The question of whether Iomega will exist in the future, however, is one we will have to wait and see about.
BTW, the IBM compact-flash-sized drives might also be a good solution, but I have no idea of the cost.
æeee!
I really doubt the ti-86 has enough processing power to decode MP3 on the fly. (If you don't know, it's a Z80 running at 6Mhz) My p166 uses about 10% of the cpu time playing mp3's, that means you'd need (roughly) a 16 mhz pentium. But the Z80 has a smaller instuction set than the pentium and would need more instructions to do the same thing. Even with an accelerated ti-86, it only runs at 10 mhz (I think). Add to that that the ti-86 only has 32k of contiguous ram to work in. I won't say impossible, (maybe very low bitrates?) but I wouldn't hold my breath.
let's not forget the rumors that Be is developing a version of it's OS to run on the Super H processor. imagine a Be powered handheld device with one of those new IBM hard drives... sounds like the ultimate MP3 player to me!
Why not the now-mature MD platform? There is both data and audio versions, and you can cram about 140MB onto a single MD (that's 74 minutes of ~MP3 quality audio; I can't tell the difference from CDs). Plus MDs are pretty cool in their own right, and the media is about $2.50 each (US) for audio.
Still, I like the idea of an all-in-one for ease of carrying, but I hate the idea for reliability. I'd hate to have to work on my PC without music playing...
It's all already available...
Right now I'm writing this on my Sony picturebook notebook on a very typable keyboard, listening to very decent streaming audio. I'm home, but I could be almost anywhere I can find a phone jack. (See below.)
I often go downtown to a cafe with net access and plug in there for a few hours of work. I toss the computer into a small backpack,(It's 2.5 lbs.) put on my rollerblades and take off. Usually I listen to my Minidisc player. It weighs about 3 ounces and runs for 9 hours on a single AA. I have an older one that I record on, using an optical cable and a discman.
When I'm in Tokyo, I often will open my laptop on top of one of the public phones, plug in to the analog data port, dial in and check my email and browse slashdot for a while. (I even did video conferencing with a guy in england from Shinjuku subway station, just to see if I could...) When I move there next week, I will have to wait about a month until the new Generation3 cellphones come out. They are supposed to do data at 200mbps. Some of them will have a built-in camera and color display and will send/receive 2fps.(With size and weight about the same as a snickers bar.)
The Sony picturebook's screen is about letterbox format. When I find a portable DVDrom drive that is compatible, I'll be all set.
You've probably guessed that I'm a bit of a gadget freak. Though I've never had a palm pilot, I've already given away my desktop, Newton, Cassiopeia, Pocketmail device, 2 pagers and 2 cellphones.
If the RIO used compact flash, I would have probably bought one, but my digital camera uses CF as does my synthesizer and most other devices.
MiniDisc is the best for music. They never skip, even when shaken really hard. I can put 144 minutes of mono (I like old jazz, which was usually done in mono.) or 74 minutes of Stereo that I cannot tell from the original CD. I buy the disks for 198yen , which is less than $2/ea. They re-record a million times and you can carry 5 of them easily in a pocket. Yes, I wish they did data, but they are still well worth their weight.
I use a Nokia 6160 phone here in the states - it's phonebook is the pda-ish aplication that I've ever actually used for any length of time. You just have to type in a name for the number it saves when you get a call. I have it tell me when I get an email. It's also my pager.
Well, I've gotten way off topic - I should wrap this up...
Jim O'Connell ICQ5213098
http://www.wirefarm.com/index.html
-- My Weblog.
The kernel IS Linux...everything else is just gravy on top of Linus', Alan's, et. al.'s gourmet dish!!!
The key to the Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD community is that it is open...if the PLC's get fast enough, the embedding of Linux will happen....already has happened: the Qube, WatchGuard, the Tiny, the MatchBochs WebServer, and Linux on the Palm are allwitness to this.
Because the system is open, you can compoile it as big or small as you like...Linux is not ANYTHING based! The oonly reason there's a marke for WinCE in hand-helds is to give Intel a place to sell low-end power-sucker x86's and the Japanese and Taiwanese to sell RAM...the bloated beast is so I/O bound, it will never fly as an embedded OS! Where does that leave M$? With the W2K bug, and 1/2 a gig for the kernel and required services! YAAAAY!
I know it wouldn't have too much appeal for anyone but us coaster ninjas, but a generic $100 discman with a mp3 decoder welded inside is what I dream of.
128mb is just not enough to be really useful. One album, blah, that's not even enough for a short plane ride. Burn myself 600+ megs on a nice disposable cdr and we're talking..
It's too bad cd burners are still too flakey and expensive for most..
Personally, I quite like the idea of an mp3 player
which I can carry a reasonable amount of media about for.
The Rio and similar have far too little RAM to be
really useful, and I don't much relish spending 10 minutes
filling them up every time I change what I want to listen to.
The minidiscs are better that way since you can
easily carry a pocketful of them, but the drawback
is that they take over an hour to fill up. We really
need a decent compromise, and Iomega's Clik! disks
might well be the cure.
The Palm VII works like a pager. It does not establish a persistent net connection; nor, at between $0.17 and $0.30 per kilobyte, would you want it to.
Okay, well, if you hook a modem to any Palm's serial port, I guess you could get the data transfer part right. But a Palm gets its combination of speed and long battery life by using a very slow CPU (a 16MHz 68020-derivative) running a very lean OS and lean apps.
Putting aside for the moment that the Palm doesn't have audio circuitry (it clicks a speaker, just like a soundcard-less PC or an Apple II), I'm more than a little skeptical that that 16MHz CPU is going to be able to decode MP3s, much less do so while doing anything else.
That said, what you want already pretty much exists. Get a Libretto, or one of Sony's new tiny computers. They're no bigger than the device you describe would have to be, they can do pretty much everything you describe with the aid of a cdpd card.
--
A pair of goggles and a pair of VR touch sensitive gloves. You could program it so that a screen appeared floating infront of you (in case you miss your terminal). For input don't use any of this pens or tiny keyboards rubbish, have a VR keyboard floating infront of that you can use but with your hands at your sides, the computer projects a pair of imaginary hands out in front of you! Make it run hurd (linux is dead). Don't build in a mobile phone, bandwidth is too low and the range to limited, include a satellite phone interface for surfing the net. Don't just play MP3s play music videos and watch films. If you have a high bandwidth Internet connection you do not need lots of storage, stream it from another machine on the internet. The only immediate problem I can see is power, but with no hard drive that should save some.
bull, my sony discman runs fine for at least 8-12 hours at a time on 2 AA batteries. Also, it has great shock protection in a tiny unit not much bigger than a cd. An extra mp3 chip and slower drive (1x instead of 2x it has now) would be trivial to implement. Maybe not as convenient as a half a gig of flash memory, but a hell of a lot cheaper.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
Posted by My_Favorite_Anonymous_Coward:
;)
I would have scroed you up, but I want to write
You are corrent. The whole idea of the need to replace CD is than it IS too big. How many of you geeks wear baggy pants? And how many of you can fit a cd-player in your normal shirt. Don't tell me "You know my jacket..." excuse, it's summer now. Of course, we know what the adventage of cd media is. 4 years ago, I picked up the cheapest CD player (aiwa) in the store and I thought I could get it under 100 dollar was incredible. lately I keep reading this 40, 49.99 clearence sale on the flyers.
I don't think CD mp3 player will ever become mainstream though, because it uses too much battery power. The most powerful rechargable AA is NiMH and they are deadly heavy, you want Hi-Lion (I forget the name, something Sony uses) but it's expensive. So you say the battery price will come down. Yes it will but so will the solid state memory. A whoppong 10 hour CD-mp3 player that runs on 5 hour of Energizer Buddy battery doesn't make sense, you see? (Don't forget decoding mp3 consume more power.)
Also, there's no easy why to get mp3 to a cd (compare to other storage method which behave like a floppy/zip. I laugh when the geeks want a CD-rw readable mp3. You know how much hassle you have to gone through to reburn a cd-rw to its maximum limit.) If you want to sell a $100-$60 product to the mess market, you can't make it so difficult. Most people who choose cd-mp3 player over slightly more expensive solid state player don't have a burnner anyway. A compact flash/smart media card only needs a serie port.
CY
For all those people asking for gadgets that do a million things at once I pose this question: will they do all those things well? Furthermore, will they be simple to use? The answer to both is most likely no. Without these two factors, no multi-function gadget will be good enough for the mainstream, and I must say that I wouldn't want to use it personally. Of course, yes, there's always Windows CE, but those systems usually eat tons of batteries and anyway, it's Microsoft. As far as this VARO thing it sort of looks like a swiss-army knife of pocket appliances, not doing any of its functions particularly well, but of course I've never used it... However, I must say that the most likely, and probably easiest to deal with, future will involve one-function computing devices, just like kitchen appliances - toasters can't make juice.
there are alot of flaws in using a cd media for portable storage/playback. First of all the energy consumption will be pretty crazy, so unless you find a way to decrease the energy usage, or find a larger form of energy storage, you end up with a lemon that you have to carry loads of battery backups and a recharger unit to plug into anywhere you are to recharge. Second of all is the skip factor of such a unit. You will have to either design some new gyro-static device with lots of shock absorbing ability, which would cost alot to implement in a consumer unit. however if you are planning on putting a pretty large dynamic memory storage device in it, so that you can pre-buffer at least a few megs of mp3s and decode them so that you can read from the cd in bursts that can, that would be good for the anti-skipping, but would also increase the power consumption for each read burst, unless you find a perfect balance.
Either way, the R&D of that design would cost any of those devices to start at ove $500, probably higher, unless the manufacturer is willing to take a short term profit hit in hope of building a large user base.
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
Shhh Cmdr, don't give it all away. Let the music industry spend their billions of dollars developing SDMI and making it the only format available in portable audio devices, only to have us to playing audio in whatever format we want (probably streaming) on our next-generation Linux based PDAs...
Of course your portal media player of any kind will merge with your portable/wearable computer/PDA. This is why the whole format control issue is bound to fail : the future is not in embedded cips capable of only one simple task. Sooner or later, all electronics in ones house and outside it will be part of computer systems.
How to install Linux on your Toshiba Libretto.
cpeterso
Good idea, except that Palm's have an outrageous pricing plan. Figure that you listen to 10 hours of music a month.
$24.99- Expanded Rate Plan. Because You're Gonna Need It.
Now, it's gonna cost you money. Assuming 9.6 KB/s because it's a cellular modem.
36000 Seconds * 9.6 KB/S = 345,600 Kilobytes.
345600 - 150 (free kb b/w)= 345450 kb.
345450 * $.30 = $103,635 + 24.99 Service Fee.
That's:
A Sony Minidisc Player ($350) and 34661 Minidiscs, for 2079700 Minutes of audio.
A Dodge Viper ($70000) with $30,000 worth of audio equipment.
Your Own T1 for 28 months. Or a 28 T1's for 1 month.
A $10000 computer with $90,000 for someone to carry it around at all times behind you. Or two people at $45,000 to take shifts.
57 Librettos with 230428 minutes of audio storage total.
Your Own Radio Station. WK/. All The Who, All The Time.
7971 Who CDs.
And at 103,000 a month, it'd take you 388,349 months (32,000 years) to get half of what bill has currently, assuming that he didn't make any more money, or spend any.
Hmm, they cost $9.99 apiece and hold 40MB (which is about 2/3rd of a CD at 128KBit/sec). So they're about $15 a CD and you need to swap them 2/3rd of the way through.
CD-R discs cost about $1-2 apiece and hold 74 minutes of audio (1 CD worth). You can decompress your MP3s, burn them as CD audio on CD-R discs, and use a $30-50 Discman to play them. Also add in about $200 for the CD-R. However, the discs are 1-time only unless your Discman supports CD-RW.
If you just want to listen to music, this thing is a pretty crummy buy. You'd have to basically treat it like a Rio and re-transfer the songs every time you want to listen to avoid sending all your cash to Iomega.
um.. yuck.
don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with linux. but THINK about this first: using ANY command-line operating system on a handheld computer would be hell. linux is still primarily text-based-- even with X you're largely running xTerms-- and i can imagine that inputting Linux commands (or even worse using VIM) using Graffiti would _not_ be fun.
The reason that the palmpilot is so popular is that it knows its limitations. The OS is designed to fit into that little tiny screen, and does it well. I doubt you'll get any PDA to work well unless the operating system is designed ground-up for the limited resources of a PDA. Linux would probably adapt much better to that kind of environment than Windows would, but even still i doubt you'll have anything you could really call Linux in a PDA.
unless of, course, by "linux" you mean just the kernel, which i imagine would work just fine as something to build on.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts