09.07.07 - 02:01pm
Perhaps since no one has been able to beat out Apples iTunes a way to try to compete with Apple is being sprung from another angle - that of a player that can use iTunes. Apple has received their very first competition from a player that supports iTunes AAC music tracks, however with the launch of Apple’s new iPods paying $300 for the 16gb rather than getting the iTouch 8gb or the iPod Classic with 160gb for the same price seems criminal.
The players comes from Creative and is in their Zen line. The new Zens are credit card sized measuring 55×83x12 mm and weighing 2.1 ounces. They have a 2.5 inch color LCD screen which supports up to 16.7 million colors in 320×240 px.
The new Zen player not only supports the AAC tracks but also MP3 and WMA formats allowing a user to buy music from pretty much any store they want to.
Category: MP3 Players, itunes | Tags: itunes, mp3-player, zen-creative | Be the First to Comment »
08.27.07 - 01:08pm
The first sleek tiny matchbook sized MP3 player, Apple’s Shuffle, is now getting some new competition from their closed rivalry SansDisk.
SansDisk has announced the launch of the Sansa Clip, taking off in September, for half the price of the Shuffle yet still the same cool matchbox size with equal or greater storage.
SansDisk is offering the 1GB Sansa Clip for $40 and also a 2GB Sansa Clip for $80.
With the player comes an FM tuner with 40 presets, as well as a built in voice recorder. Flash memory. An OLED screen that will display your song, album, and genre for easy music searches. A re-chargeable batter with 15 to 30 hours of playlife. A clip, same as the Shuffle and sporting a superior sound that SansDisk said in their press release “is one of the best sounding MP3’s on the market.”
Category: MP3 Players | Tags: | Be the First to Comment »
08.17.07 - 11:45am
Sandisk from Sansa has decided to go ino Halloween mode a little early becoming the slasher of prices slicing their SanDisk Sansa Connect player which was released this past March a whopping $100 from $249 to $149.
Guess its one way to compete with the iPod as the player now comes in at the same price as the Nano, which since it doesn’t play video you would have thought it would be for less to start with.
The Sandisk has 4GB of memory space, a 2.2-color display, an internal speaker, photo player and Wi-Fi.
It’s the Wi-Fi that makes the player worth looking at and is what puts it into competition with the Zune without the video. Owners of the Sandisk who have a Yahoo! ID can listen to LAUNCHcast Internet radio, browse Flickr albums and photos, and see what their friends are listening to and download them over the air.
Category: MP3 Players | Tags: | Be the First to Comment »
08.16.07 - 10:15am
Totally cool and maybe a way to help boost those lagging CD sales.
In the UK a deal has already been signed in which a company called Ripfactory will soon have in CD rippers (kiosks) in CD stores, thus allowing you purchase a CD load it into the ripper and put it onto your iPod before you even walk out of the store.
The kiosk will load up to 4 CD’s at a time and uses a touch screen. Along with transferring the music to your iPod you can also transfer cover art and the standard meta tags listing the tracks and album titles.
The kiosks will transfer DVD’s as well.
The transfer can be made to the iPod, MP3 players or to your awesome iPhone/mobile phone.
“Once you’ve bought your CDs over the counter you just pop them into the kiosk in the shop, plug in your iPod or MP3 player, and it will transfer all the content then and there, within a matter of a few minutes,” said Patrick McGrath Ripfactory’s managing director.
Category: MP3 Players, iPod, video | Tags: cd-converter, dvd-downloads, iPhone, iPod, mp3-player | Be the First to Comment »
08.10.07 - 09:25am
Alba has just launched two new MP3 players sporting 2GB and 4GB. They retain only their serial like numbers for their names which are MP32GD11SIL and MP34GD11BLK. (boy those names will see them flying off the shelves - do these guys at least name their dogs?)
They don’t look too bad, typical square MP3 players with blue backlit LCD displays. The players come in black or silver and also come with headphones.
They weigh 34 grams and measure 5cmx6cmx2cm. Small enough to fit in your pocket where they will have to go since they don’t have the cool handy clip the Shuffle does.
The players play for around 10 hours on one AAA battery and have a SD/MMC memory card slot to swap playlists and upgrade memory. They support MP3 and WMA files.
The memory cards are definitely a plus to the MP3 players and price isn’t bad either retailing for about $46 for the 2GB and $80 for the 4GB.
Category: MP3 Players | Tags: | Be the First to Comment »
08.08.07 - 02:32pm
The Zune may not have met most blogging standards as the hippest most up to date utterly cool device on the MP3 market, yet it has taken the market share it had hoped for and with the release of new reformatted Zunes coming out this Christmas season it is liable to take more of that market share.
This means that someone is losing market share and while the iPod and the iPhone are still in complete control it is Creative, maker of Zen players, that is suffering the biggest loss since the onslaught of the Zune.
Creative’s stock fell to it’s lowest point in the last 11 years after Creative announced its fifth loss in the last six quarters. Over the last year the stock has lost 35 percent and is the worst performer on Singapore’s benchmark Straits Times Index landing today at $6.60. Sales have fallen 28 percent to $162.2 million in fourth quarter earnings.
Category: MP3 Players, Zune, iPod | Tags: apple, creative, iPod, microsoft, zen, Zune | Be the First to Comment »
08.01.07 - 03:42pm
Maybe they are just “repositories for stolen music” after all, as Doug Morris the Universal CEO, so eloquently stated last November when explaining why Microsoft was paying the music labels for every Zune sold. He also said that they should be getting paid for the stolen music. If that is the case they may have to charge a lot more than a $1 as a UK survey showed not such great news.
A survey conducted in the UK by Entertainment Media Research says that 43 percent of the people surveyed downloaded music illegally up from 36 percent one year ago.
Why? Well the reason given by 91 percent of the people was simple “Its free.”
The pirated music downloads have risen in all age groups in the UK in direct correspondence to the rise in the amount of little music players people own. 77 percent of people now own a MP3 music player of some kind up from 57 percent last year and 37 percent the year before.
Category: MP3 Players, iPod, itunes | Tags: downloaded_music, illegally, iPod, MP3 Players, pirated_music, stolen_music, Zune | Be the First to Comment »
07.10.07 - 05:12pm
It is a given that if you listen to your iPod during class, particularly during a test you will get busted, but one way to really get busted, as in three-year-prison-term busted is to listen to your iPod while you’re supposed to be listening to testimony
during a murder trial!
The Online Times has reported that while Judge Roger Chappel was presiding during the murder trial of Alan Wicks he thought he heard “tinny music” but dismissed it as a figment of his imagination. That is until a juror passed him a note saying that one of the jurors was listening to her MP3 player.
The juror, a Muslim woman in her early 20’s, was apparently listening to the music beneath her headscarf as the man who bludgeoned his disabled wife to death testified.
It is thought to be the first time such a happening has taken place and if proven the woman will be facing charges of contempt of court. People found guilty of contempt of court face an average of a three-year prison term.
Category: MP3 Players, iPod | Tags: contempt_of_court, iPod, jurors, mp3_player, murder-trial | Be the First to Comment »
05.25.07 - 11:25am
When traveling through a new city it is always more interesting and fun to see the history, feel the life that was there and see some of the sights and sounds of new place, through the eyes of those who have lived there.
Unfortunately, it is not everyone that has a friend in every city who can give a personal guided tour and lets face it - joining a tour group can take away from some of the adventure of seeing things at your own pace and leisure.
Tourcaster solves these problems in elegant style by offering “tours” of different cities and countries across the world, that allow you to know about the places your touring and open your eyes to sights you may see yet not otherwise know. (It is the story of a place that makes it magical). They do this by offering downloads for your iPod that you can then walk the city with. The tours come with a map showcasing the landmarks on the audio tour and then you can listen, pause, stop as you wish.
Category: MP3 Players, iPod | Tags: civil_war_battlefields, georgia_tour, ipod-audio_tours, ipod-walking_tours, tourcaster | Be the First to Comment »
05.10.07 - 10:05am
Simple and easy, that’s the market that Slacker, a new portable little music maker, is going for. They are hoping to challenge the iPod with a different format - ease of use over multiple uses.
What Slacker offers is a player that with a simple touch of a button will keep as many songs as a consumer wants for as long as they want for a cheap $7.50 a month subscriber fee. All you have to do is hit the “Love it” button while listening to a customizable radio station and the song will be saved with similar styled songs sent to you. If you hate it you can hit the “Ban It” button and songs and songs like it will not come your way again.
Jonathan Sasse, one of the three founders of Slacker says, “Most MP3 players are too much work for the average user. They don’t want to bother updating their players via a USB connection. Our devices will just feed themselves.”
Category: MP3 Players, iPod | Tags: forrester_research, iPod, listen_to_music, mp3_players | Be the First to Comment »
