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4.8G Portable MP3 Player
[Xorian] writes "There's a new portable mp3 device called the Personal Jukebox. Apparently, this is the result of a research effort from Compaq's Systems Reserach Center (one of the two Compaq research groups that developed the Itsy). The kicker is that it's supposed to be able to store about 100 CDs worth of music (it's got a a 4.8 GByte hard disk) and have 10 hours of battery life yet fit in your jacket pocket. No word on pricing yet though. "
One of the major plus points of MP3 players is that they have no moving parts and therefore are not subject to shock [well most types of shock anyway].
Doesn't putting a hard disk in here sortof spoil this ?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Okay, so I bid $300, which is about double the rio. What's a fair price? If it costs $900, then that's just too much.
I keep on hearing about all of these wonderful mp3 players that hold oodles of music and have wonderful battery life..
but where are they?
The PJB 100 Personal Jukebox limited Premier Edition will be available the week of Nov 15, 1999 at a major web music site. If you would like us to notify you by e-mail when additional product is available please contact us at pjbinfo@mp3factorydirect.com
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Can I play my favorite arcade games on it yet? I heard that after the Kodak camera this was now a standard required feature for all hi-tech toys :)
Can your IM do this?
From what I can see on the page, you USB it to your 'puter and use Windez Exploder to copy the files over.
Familiar Windows "Explore" model for viewing and managing Jukebox content
Hmm.
This is the kind of thing I've been waiting for, esp. the part where it rips directly from CD to the unit. That's seriously cool.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
ibm 2.5" drives are HIGHLY durable and stable. the player will have a huge memory buffer since it claims that it will only spin the hard drive up once every 10 minutes.
-- adraken
I want one of those for in my car!
Does it use CE or Linux ?
This is not what I would call usable. Hard Drives, even the most modern, would not really be able to withstand the shock of hitting the ground when you drop the device, even when the HD is not spinning. HDs might be rated for 1000G for 0.1us, but you get that force by dropping a HD from 1 or 2 foot onto concrete. Maybe the HD could be encased in some kind of jelly bump-soothing gel?
Of course, being able to fit over 4000 minutes of music on a portable device sounds like fun, but surely a more durable, but lower capacity medium would be better, say fitting a Superdisk into such a device or something similar. Even CD mp3 players seem to be the most popular option amongst those here on Slashdot!
I am assuming that the device has some integral RAM in which to buffer the mp3s from the HD, 16Mb should be the minimum, so the HD only has to spin up every 15 minutes or so. That would increase battery life considerably.
What I am waiting for is the integrated portable digital camera, portable games machine, mp3 player and sound recorder of some kind. I know that MAME was ported to a Kodak digital camera (cool use of resources!).
Sorry I couldn't beat the Elite Hacksaws. (3l337 H4X0RZ) :-)
I suppose I'm just going to have to put in some overtime and get both...
-=-=-=-=-
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
I'm guessing that it's going to price around 800$. This is based on this quote:
Remote Solution's PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour vs $200 per playback hour for flash-media storage units.
If they store 80 hours, and it's price/length ratio is 10$ pe rhour, about 800$.
This price is also supported by the fact that they compare the price to flash-media devices at 200$ an hour. The 200$ MP3 players store about an hours worth of music.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Compaq, more so than any other computer manufacturer, embraces these new mediums. I wonder if it is because they see their core business (duh, computers) receding to Dell and the others.
The company has also been going through a lot of difficulties lately with management and making the transition to a direct sales company.
On topic here... one of my friends was recently spouting on and on about his newly discovered Real Jukebox, and how he was thinking of buying a sub woofer and new speakers just for his computer, he enjoyed it so much. His largest wish was that he could copy his set lists onto CDs. So I think this sort f thing could really catch on. Obviously the largest factor will be price... but as always, I am sure it will come down. If I had the option to pay less for say, only 3 or 4 CDs worth... I would certainly do it. But that might not be an option.
Remote Solution's PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour vs $200 per playback hour for flash-media storage units.
Sounds like it'll come out to under $810. Probably $800.
As for shock absorption, the hard drive will probably go corrupt after a few bumps. The heads on a hard drive that small will continuously smack against the disk and cause bad sectors/physical damage.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Isn't it amazing what companies release right before the holidays??? My wife thought I was nuts when I wanted teh $200 Lego Mindstorms set...now she's gonna have a heart attack when I tell her I want a $800(approx, they said less than $10/hour and it holds 81 hours) MP3 player!
-=-=-=-=-
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
(a 4.6GB portable mp3 player with hard disk)
On slashdot it states:
The kicker is that it's supposed to be able to store about 100 CDs worth of music..
On pjbox.com it states:
Storage huge volume of songs squal to approx. 100 pieces (not 100 songs) of normal audio CD.
http://www.freebsd.org
I'd love to have a portable MP3 player that runs Linux. That would rock. I'd be able to have total control over whatever it does--imagine being able to control the device at that level.
This ought to make the stupid record companies happy.
MP3.com perhaps?
Regards, Ralph.
...I want a radio built in as well. I'm just never satisfied 8-)
I'm not impressed though. Why not insert a 13 GB HD, at least? If you are going to use those noisemaking/krasching devices, why not have some space??? Yea yea, prices, but they are not that expensive nowadays...
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Now that DVD encryption has been cracked, it seems that something like this could be used to store / transfer DVDs. A movie jukebox, if you will.
Okay, I'm going to rip 100 CDs onto a harddrive that only has enough portable power to play 10 hours with of music.
Let's think this one through:
Each Cd is roughly an hour of music.
10 hours = 10 CDs.
Why do I care about the other 90 CDs that I could rip to its harddrive?
Unless it's loaded with REALLY high quality MP3s, you'd have to recharge it 5 times just to hear all the songs. There better be an AC adapter available with it.
I've been looking for one of these at a reasonable /. stories out them, but they're all ridiculously priced.
price for a while - any idea if there's one coming out for under $150? There have been a bunch of
I've got a CD burner, and would really like to be able to carry all my music with me on only a few CDs - after all, once you get to have more than 30 or so, it's difficult to find carrying cases with enough capacity.....
With a hard-drive, as others have mentioned, it'll be prone to shocks (which will cause the disk heads to skid merrily over the delicate surfaces of the disk..), and, to give 10 hours of battery life, will probably need a car battery to be strapped to the wearer's back. The two main Rio features I like are that it's light and runs on "dead" AA batteries.
How long does 4.8Gb of data take to download over a parallel port or USB port, anyway?
I'm wondering if the Jukebox is crippled, in that it only allows files to be written to and delete from the player.... not read from the player.
If so, what makes the Jukebox from a laptop, in that bidirection file transfers are enabled on a laptop, but not the handheld player? Maybe the industry's just too scared of being sued by the RIAA for coming out with a player that can be used to share music. Sad.....
These all seem like pricey-kinda-kludgy solutions... check out a review at http://www.tech -report.com/reviews/1999q4/mp-shuttle/mp-shuttle-1 .x or you can go shopping at http://xeenontech.safeshopper.com/.
Seems like a real solution to me.. 2 different models.. one has a pullout HD rack, and the other just has a CD drive in it to read normal burned CDs with mp3's on them.. and it is shipping now! This is what I want for Christmas!
The page says it has 80 playback hours and it's price per playback hour is less than $10, so final price is less than:
80 playback hours * $10/playback hour = $800
One of the features that I love about my Rio is that I can take it running with no skipping, and no fear that I will be breaking something mechanically (except my legs! I'm in bad shape).
If I were to try to run with a spinning hard drive attached to me, I'm sure it would be only a matter of weeks before I destroyed it with the constant shocks... I'm sure they shock-test those things, but they're not meant for the several-times-per-second jarring of someone who is jogging. (Or running to catch a train, for that matter).
- Drew
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
About two weeks ago slashdot had a reference to a press release from some company called Hangjin or something that had developed such an mp3 player in conjunction with Compaq. It will cost about $800 when released in November. All the relevant issues were already discussed on slashdot (hard drive spinning down to conserve juice, shock resistance of the mechanism, etc.)-- so check the previous slashdot discussion for some good info.
Dillrod
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The drive is supposedly on only "once every 10 minutes" to read more data into a buffer. The claimed purpose is to increase battery life (and given they're claiming 10 hours with a HDD it seems to work). I'd tend to think that means that except while filling the buffer the shock resistance is that of a non-operating IBM portable drive, which is actually rather high.
Do they exist? If so, where can I find an mp3 player that uses cds as its medium?
-xyster
This may seem off topic...but what-ever happened to mp4's? Last I heard was that NWA used it for a song. I sure hope that mp4's come soon cause I can't stand the quality of mp3. Most people can't tell the difference, but when you create music of your own you really see the difference when cd-audio is converted to mp3. It takes alot away (espically brain-wave synch, and different types of echoes). Anyway when mp4's come out I hope these modern mp3 players will have upgrades to play mp4's!
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of
http://loki.linuxgames.com
I do a lot of jogging, and would love to use one of these, but I want to take a look at some detailed specs for a couple reasons:
Can anyone (at least semi-scientifically) address any of these issues or point me to some relevant shock/mtbf specifications? Is this design anywhere close to as durable as CD/MD players? Are the drives replacable?
Great! This is just great! I finish my own portable .MP3 player, and two days later somebody announces that it's already obselete!
Granted, mine won't do anything near real-time encoding, but thats what my desktop is for.
Specs:
Micro-GX motherboard (4.5x4.1x1/2) 166 MediaGX processor
1 x 32M DIMM
2 x IBM 2.4G 2.5mm HD
1 x Tulip Fast Ethernet
1 x custom PCI 'L' connector
1 x custom power supply
1 x custom plexiglas case
3 x Compaq laptop batteries
It may have no screen, but it runs for up to 16 hours on the batteries, plugs into the lighter socket in the car, and it Runs Linux(tm)!
.sig: Now legally binding!
1. It will proably be far to expensive. I think 800$+ is a good estimate.
2. It won't be durable enough. It's been said before, but I think it bears repeating. Hard Drives don't stand up to punishment well. A couple of drops or a hard bump while the disk is spinning and what you have is a 800$ paperweight.
3. Harddrive + Magnet = MP3 Mush. Nuf said.
4. It will break on its own in time. I can't count the number of harddrives I have lost to corrupted sectors. On my PC I can at least isolate and try and eliminate them, but I doubt you'll have that capbility on this thing.
For those reasons I think I'll stick with my RIO, at least for a little while longer.
"He is wisests, that knows he knows nothing." --Socrates
Fits 100 cds, eh? I'd love to get rid of them, just have a little playlist thingy to access all my music. I've filled my 72 count cd case, and still have about 20 lying around. Even if i can only listen to 10 hours before recharging, it's still better than having 100 cds with me.
-Raskolnik
"You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth."
-Henrik Ib
Taken from the website, they're estimating a cost of $10 an hour of music - at 81 hours, that's $810. A very steep price for an MP3 player.
Also, it's got 10 megs of integral DRAM for caching MP3 music, thus spinning up and down the HD occasionaly.
My question is the following: Doesn't spinning up and down that much severely reduce the lifecycle of the hard drive, and isn't a ten minute cache an "best-case" kind of thing? I'd assume most songs are 5 minutes, and you don't know if the user is going to want to play the next song in the set, or whatever.
It's been proven, though, that HDs these days can take high shocks (witness implementations in cars, etc, that ended up not needing any padding). I'm sure, though, that Compaq has put the HD in some sort of gel.
So many things couldn't happen today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams coming out of the blue
ls:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
It's been said here already... Sheesh!
Unless of course eyeballs on adverts count for so much.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
This takes the place of the RCA player, which
backed down on IBM microdrive support. But will
I run out and break the bank? The press release
says it stores 80 hours and costs less than
$10/playing hour. How much less? Will people
really spend 3 to 4 times the price of the
new generation of players? Maybe they will,
since you are getting 60 - 80 times the storage.
I know that I will have to think, even given those
seemingly compelling numbers. It's like the old
sales trick: Buy two $30 dollar items for $50 and
save $10. But, you can save $20 dollars by just
not spending the extra money. So, I think if an
hour won't kill you, go for the lower storage
players and wait for the market to catch up to
this new device, so you can spend knowing that
you are paying for market value and not "Ground
Breaking Value".
-Dave
At about $2.60/hr, minidisk is cheaper than mp3. And it's better quality sound. And I can fit 20 disks & headphones & a player in my shaving bag. & it doesn't tie up my computer for recording. I can record quality sound by plugging in a microphone. And I've dropped mine (a sony mz-r30)
4 ft. onto concrete, and it lived.
So why bother with these MP3 players?
Surely there's no actual engineering reason for this -- the electronics for a basic radio tuner ought to fit in the unused space of most portable CD players -- so I can only assume that it's the work of marketing droids.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
To me, the primary advantage of an MP3 player (which the Rio does not quite get there yet) is being able to hold a lot of music that can be carried around. This is the first unit that is getting close to the promise.
In any case, IBM 2.5" disk drive are extremely rugged (the heads have extremely low mass).
It was Public Enemy, not NWA, and it wasn't really an mp4 as claimed.
Great - competition for the empeg player - this seems like a better option though - since empeg is designed to mount in your car. My concerns: * cost - $800 seems way high * hard disk failure - will we be able to swap it out when it fails On the plus side though, it is good to see continued momentum in the MP3 market and specifically at these consumer electronics toys. Just in time for Christmas!
No price given, but they say "up to 81 hours of music" and "less than $10 per hour of playback."
I'd guess maybe $650 street. That's way beyond other MP3 players. However, it's cheaper than the Empeg in-car player. But to have enough memory to hold enough music for a cross-country road trip (a round trip, at that), hell I'd pay it. I was never looking forward to having to hook up a 64MB MP3 player up to a computer just to get some new music. And I thought the one with a 340MB microdrive was going to be cool!
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
This device, at 9.9 oz, is almost 4 times the size of Diamond's Rio, which is 2.75 oz. I guess the difference is probably attributatble to the IBM hard drive. I'll probably stick with the Diamond Rio and hope the flash memory prices come down. I think I can survive jogging 5 miles with just a measly one hour of music.
This device sounds interesting, but not for my needs. I don't plan on doing anything for 800 consecutive hours, and if I did, I don't know if I have 800 hours of music that I would want to listen to.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
I believe you mean media as plural of medium, mein froind!
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I just hope they don't make you run Insight Mangler...er... Manager. -k
"The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour vs $200 per playback hour for flash-media storage units."
Do the math... that's gonna mean that it's between $800 and $900 bucks. If we're lucky.
Screw that... too much money.
I could swear I saw discussion of this topic a couple or three days ago on /.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
It is a hard-drive. The data does not go anywhere if your battery drains. They have these things called rechargeable batteries now. Yup! All you do is plug it in and the battery comes back! Oh, there is an optional car adapter too. I can put every CD I own onto this, then I can velcro the thing to my dash and be all set. I never will have to bother with flipping though a CD album during a stoplight again.
Did you think that this was a disposable device?
Zip! Nadda! SatanicDemonicMusicInterference is OUT! It's obvious that SDMI is not even considered important, to any company that is customer focused. An obidient slave to the old school industry would push the same player with SDMI, and not mention MP3 at all. "It's over: It's MP3!"
=]
I just don't get this at all. I've already ordered a Nomad that will hold an hour of music and has a FM receiver in it. No delicate harddrives, just some flash memory. I'm sure it will last longer than my old Sony CD Player has after being dropped a couple of times on tight corners! And I also have no reason to carry every song I've ever liked around with me. Who has the time to even set that up?!?! I'll stick to spending my time playing Homeworld or 1/2 Life.
_______________________
Mello like the Yello, but without the fizz.
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
Anyone know if these hardware MP3 decoders support bitrates other than 128kbit/s? I generally encode all of mine at 192... nothing worse than jamming along to your favorite tune and hearing just a tad of "metallic" compression... even if it's only occasionally and barely noticeable. My goal of moving all my CDs to a server WILL be achieved with the help of Grip/cdparanoia/bladeenc (even if it takes another 6 months and two more harddrives), I just hope I'll be able to do something with them besides listening at the 'puter.
I thought starting and stopping hard drives was extremely hard on them... something to do with the lubrication on the spindles. Has this been solved for these small drives?
The website says it will cost somewhere between free and $10 per playback hour.
;)
Seeing as the unit as 80 playback hours, it'll probably cost less than $800.
Remote Solution?s [sic] PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour...
Assuming that "less than $10" means $9.99, which it almost always does, then this puppy is going to be at least $799... spendy.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
I want one with a colour LCD screen, then i could store my porn on it as well ;)
Lithium ion rechargable battery + recharging cradle = AC adapter. Are you seriously suggesting this thing has no value simply because you can't listen to every song on it all at once?
With that kind of storage capacity, why should you accept any kind of quality degredation? Why not give the device the capability to play wav files as well? Or better yet, do that and come out w/ a lower cost one that only does wav files. No mp3 decoding makes for less hardware, fewer liscense fees, and a cheaper product.
put in a small plug for a project I'm working on. It's an mp3-cd player that also plays audio CD's. I eventually plan to add hard drive capabilities and offer an option where someone could send me systems specs and I could send them back a boot-disk with all the required software.
Currently, it's not portable, but with smaller hardware it could be. I'm using mine as a home stereo component.
It's all open source with code available for download, and documentation is in the works.
http://cs.atu.edu/~ewyles/mp3000.htm
BTW, sign up for our mailing list if you want future update.
PEACE
ps -- sorry for the shameless plug, I just think this project is cool.
Ever consider the possiblity that you can take more than one set of batteries with you?
I know when I drag my CD player with me, I usually have two sets of Nickel Metal Hydroxide battries with me. They last a whole hell of a lot longer than a normal NiCad battery.
BTW does anybody know what type of battery they used for the battery life expectancy?
Now shiping is the best solution for all your MP3 needs. It has a 6 hour lithium ion battery, upgradable 3.2 gig drive, CD-rom, comes in two stylish colors and can run linux with it 300 mhz G3 processor! Connect it to your network with it's built in 10/100 base T connection or download songs with its built in 56.6 modem. it also has a 12.1" active matrix display! The total cost is $1599. thats right - it's an apple iBook. Why pay $800 for something that does nothing but play mp3's?
Seems to me with over 1000 possible songs stored this is the perfect device for a professional DJ or in place of a Car CD changer. How many folks would want to go jogging wearing a $500 walkman? I get sweat all over it and have a habbit of dropping those things a million times, and praying everytime they survived.
~Owen
Yeah, if only I had $800 to spend on a portable MP3 player...
Earth to Slashdot, come in Slashdot.
For my money ($200-$300) I'll pick up a portable CD MP3 player (I've only been waiting for one to be released for the past year and a half). The Pine SM-200C has a very yummy list of specs. According to this C|Net article it's supposed to come out this month.
Another player is Vertical Horizon's CP200. It's got fewer features but it's $100 cheaper. Unfortunatly the CP200 won't be released until "sometime before the end of first quarter next year".
That site ask people to order and have no mention of price or clickable link whatsoever. but that thingy looks like a pullable chasis for a standard IDE hard drive! that means i can just stuff my 20 giger in there.
Now whats the point of having a large (expensive) hard drive when the battery can only play for 10 hours! are they going to make a less expensive 1 gig verison? i would like that!
I used to use my laptop for playing MP3. I just kept it in my backpack and attached headphones to it. My laptop went into suspend mode when I shut it, but it still played the music. When I ran at full speed it bounced around a lot and actually "skipped", the MP3 player program gave an error message about a read error. No hard drive problems after about 6 months though. It was worth it since I didn't really use that laptop for anything else.
Again we fall a bit short, the CD player that played MP3 cd's (By pine technologies, I think...) only had 8 hours of battery life. 10 hours is just short of how much you can hold on the drive (100 CD's =~ 700 Mins of music) 10 hours is 600 minutes and that is a bit short, plus you wouldn't want to bother with scaling down the quality of your MP3s to fit more on the drive. :)) MP3 player or a car deck is much more attractive to my tastes. Especially a car deck, that would play MP3's off CD(-rom).
That assumes you want to hear all your music between battery changes. Overall I bet you will be gobbling batterys. Talk to the Win CE people... they munch the batteries to power their full-color crash boxes.
I listen to music primarily at home and in the car, so a system component for my stereo (Other than an E-machine, or Imac
Got my Visor finally! Need to get the MP3 player springboard module, then output that to the car stereo via one of them tape-player plug in things.
Wonder how many batteries that will snarf.
It's also as large as a toilet seat. I wouldn't do this for the same reason I wouldn't go jogging with my home entertainment system or even my boombox.
...two sets of Nickel Metal Hydroxide...
Are these the batteries that taste exactly like Oreo cookies?
Why not build a small CD-ROM drive that will take CD singles? That'd be the perfect, wallet-sized storage media, it will give you the same footprint as a minidisc, and CD-R single blanks are fairly cheap. For some reason, CD-R singles are not very popular, but in asian countries such as Japan they are all over the place. At about 150Mbs a disc, it's great for a CD-ROM bootable Linux distro, a clean (though horrendously slow) Windoze installation, or just a wallet sized disc of MP3z. 8-) -=- SiKnight
Can it only rip directly from CD to the Player or can I also copy from HD to the player?
From the description: "The PJB-100 offers fast direct digital transfers from a standard audio CD directly to MP3 files on the player."
note the "direct". it never says something about copy from the HD (let alone to the HD).
Nuff said! Cant use it in your car at night, or anything at night... Cant read the damn thing unless you have a flashlight or something.. I dont see ANYTHING about a backlight option like personal pagers have, etc..
The article says "Remote Solution's PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour vs $200 per playback hour for flash-media storage units." This is a direct quote from the website. When they are refering to $10/hour they are talking about the PJB-100, which is the mp3 player itself. If they would give this machine a color lcd. Then make it a PDA with that kind of storage and the ability to play mp3's, I would buy one for $800. Linux based OS of course.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Just look at the site - the whole thing is an obvious troll. I can see that much even having been up since 07:00 GMT Wednesday (now 09:10 GMT Thursday). Rob must really be pushing the edge these days - he doesn't usually fall for this kind of thing.
Sorry to seem harsh, but the first level filter seems to have failed bigtime.
.sigish thing
What I would want in a mp3-player: 1. User should be able to put any 2,5" HD in it as long as it isn't thicker than the original *without* loosing warranty.
2. High speed port, like ethernet/usb/firewire, for communicating with computers.
3. Possibility to access the HD from windows/linux/dos/whatever to use it as portable storage as well as a mp3 player.
4. Plug-in support for additional formats so that I could play my Amiga mod's and wavs and... and...
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
It said it had about 80 hours of play and cost about $10 an hour. That means it will cost about $800. To much for me. Hopefully, it'll mean a jump in tech for competitors and major drops in price, though. Dammit--whenever I think about jumping into a technology, a new one comes out that radically outdates it. It's awesome.
There have been several posts in this discussion speculating on hard disk drive reliability in the PJB.
The PJB-100 as it's being shown at Comdex next week uses an IBM Travelstar drive. You can find details about it on the IBM web site.
The shock rating on this drive is 150G for 2 msec while operating, and 700G for 1 msec non-operating. 150G for 2 msec corresponds roughly to the amount of energy you get by dropping the drive from waist height. Of course, how the drive tolerates that depends on a lot of things, including what it lands on, how it lands, and how it's packaged.
You're not going to damage the disk by normal use, like jogging or using it in your car. We've had prototypes of the PJB for almost a year now, and we've used them a lot: commuting, jogging, skiing. We have never had a disk fail because of shock. It is possible to make the player report an error because you shook it too violently; but we've never had that behavior actually damage the disk.
Also, it's important to remember that the PJB never writes to the disk while you're out there playing music, it only reads it. And, of course, while playing music the disk is powered off almost all the time. Unless you use the buttons, it's on only about 20 seconds every 10 minutes. So the odds are reasonably good that when you drop it the disk isn't operating.
In reality, the most fragile component in all these players is the LCD, which is made from two very thin sheets of glass.
Andrew
The battery is Lithium Ion. The one that provides 10 hours of playing time is spec'ed at 1350 mA-Hours.
It's also replaceable - if you're on the SF to Sydney non-stop flight (14 hours) and not planning on getting any sleep, you can take a spare charged battery with you. Any other time, one battery should last you long enough.
Andrew