Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
From the ‘classical music’ department—9 Mozart symphonies available for free download: celebrating 250 years since the phenomenal composer was born. iTunes users, you may want to try this podcast link instead. [via]
The WSJ reports [via] that Amazon.com could be entering the music subscription services arena as soon as this summer—according to the paper, they’re in advanced talks with the major labels (EMI, Sony BMG, Universal, Warner). I was stunned to read that the company has already hired a staggering 3000 (that’s: three thousand) employees to work [...]
Fraunhover, the inventors of the MP3 format, working on a tool that adds watermarking DRM to your MP3s: adds a hash value that links the content provider with the authorised owner. [via]
The Earbud Clips should help you with those tangled headphone cords. We got a sample from PKOH NYC to review and we were impressed by the clever design. They come in a pack of four (in four different colours: black, white, green, pink) for 10 bucks, plus a dollar for shipping; you can order them [...]
Seagate presents 12GB 1-inch hard drive: 23% smaller than the current 6GB drives, shipping begins on Q3.
(Don’t you just love our descriptive titles?) Songbird was released a few days ago. It’s an open-source iTunes-like-looking media player, based on Firefox. It doesn’t lock you when it comes to choosing a digital music store as it can handle both DRM and non-DRM stores fine. You can also use it browse sites that carry [...]
Y! Music vs. Pandora vs. Last.fm vs.Soundflavor: obviously a bit biased since it’s written by the director of personalization for Yahoo! Music, but still a good wrap-up of what each of these services has to offer. What Yahoo! has got going for it is the huge amount of listener preference ratings they’ve collected over the [...]
Review: mobiBLU DHH-200: nice form factor and a plethora of features but the non-intuitive and slow UI could use a little improvement. More pictures of the DHH-200.
ThinkSecret reports reports that Apple is working on a revamped iPod, dedicated to video for good this time.
The entire front face will be occupied by a 3.5’’ touch-sensitive display; touch it and a digital clickwheel appears. Some gorgeous mockups have appeared—you’re looking at one below:
Regarding features: no wireless connectivity, which makes sense—this device’s upgrade is [...]
SanDisk: No. 2 seller of MP3 players in the US: they’ve sold 1M during the recent holiday quarter; that’s 13M less than Apple but apparently good enough to get them to the second place. They’re on the right track to keeping that place (no way to dethrone Apple I’m afraid) with their decent, feature-rich/low-cost lineup; [...]