Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
Last week, Creative Labs introduced two miniaturized versions of its flagship Zen Vision:M player, the Zen V and Zen V Plus players. What the Plus does that the plain V doesn’t, is video (mainly: MPEG-4, WMV and DivX) and FM radio. And that difference will set you back a mere $10-$30 bucks (depending on the [...]
AppleInsider broke the news that iTunes Producer, the software labels use to submit music for inclusion to the iTMS, was updated to include support for tracks in the Apple Lossless format. Speculation that the iTMS may begin offering tracks in the lossless format have risen substantially ever since, but it’s probably safer to remain sceptical [...]
Video: 10 minute long presentation of the Gigabeat S30/S60 GUI (courtesy of ABi).
Verdict? Speedy and nice-looking; I’m very impressed. Toshiba’s offering looks like it was worth the wait. Also: unboxing the Gigabeat S, pictures.
Amazon sells the 60GB version for $374 and the 30GB one for $277.
Sony Japan announced a price reduction last week for its A1000, A1200 and A3000 Network Walkman (NW) series. According to ATRAC Life:
WALKMAN A1000 Series
NW-A1000 (6GB)—22,800 yen (2,000 yen price reduction)
NW-A1000/B [Limited Ed] (6GB)—20,800 yen (2,000 yen price reduction)
NW-A1000/N [Limited Ed] (6GB)—20,800 yen (2,000 yen price reduction)
WALKMAN A1200 Series
NW-A1200/B [Limited Ed] (8GB)—24,000 yen (2,000 yen price [...]
Interesting point: why isn’t there built-in podcasting support in the latest versions of iTunes’ competitors? Podcasting is huge and drives average usage duration up (see: “Thanks to the built-in podcasting support “iTunes users tune in for an average of 111 minutes versus 46.4 minutes per RealPlayer user—2.4 times as long.””)
So why do Windows Media Player, [...]
Introduction
The “Datasafe oomi” is basically the “EZAV Pebble”, branded by the folks over at Advanced MP3 Players. Its former name was the “AMP3 Pebble”. It is a Korean product, made in China. Hope all this unnecessary naming history didn’t confuse you.
What makes the Oomi stand apart? It’s one of the smallest MP3 players around. It’s [...]
John Borland, with an excellent story (via) on how Sony’s Connect (the supposed answer to Apple’s iTunes) came to be such a crappy, bug-ridden app. So bad that the US branch of Sony refused to release it in their market.
By early summer, the Connect programmers were saying they had no way of meeting plans to [...]