Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
Deal: Woot’s got the iRiver U10 (512MB) on sale today for $99 (add $5 for shipping). It’s the 512MB version; you can read our review here. As is the case Woot, the offer is valid for today only. If we may offer our humble recommendation… go for it.
All signs are leading to this, at least. According to Stuff Magazine, they’ve sacked the European PR team and moved the European marketing headquarters from Germany to an in-house department to Korea. Sales in the European continent are slim (were they ever rosy?), and this seems to be another victim of the iPod storm.
Basically the [...]
With no interesting new products to show, the U10 was the center of attention. They’re about to retire the H10 series and base their new line of offerings on the U10’s design. There was talk about large screens, 1.8-inch hard drives and PlaysForSure support for these upcoming products. Engadget has shot a video with this [...]
The iRiver H10 is the first device that allows you to listen to your tracks from subscription services on the Xbox 360: you’ll need to perform a firmware upgrade on the H10. Speaking of the H10, TG Daily has an article on its innards [via]. [via]
Everybody loves lists, right? Thanks to The Age’s article [via], we’ve got a bunch of data on the Australian MP3 player market. Here we go:
more than 400k Australians may be buying an MP3 player during the holiday season
more than 6 out of 10 MP3 players sold are iPods → more than 8 out of 10 [...]
A look at the innards of iRiver’s T30: and here’s a review of the device.
Another positive review for the iRiver U10: but the small capacity (comes in 1GB and 2GB versions—remember that it can play videos) is quite a limiting factor. Read our previous coverage on the device. Oh, and if you’re in the US, you can win one if you sign up for iRiver’s newsletter before November 30. [...]
Disappointing Q3 Results for iRiver: sales up 4.2% compared to previous quarter but net profit down 26.4%. Side-fact: 3 out of 4 players they’re selling are flash-based.
Sony’s figures ain’t that good either with net profits down by 47%. Also read: Creative’s Q1 results.
Avid readers of the site should already know by now that iRiver’s U10 is a highly-coveted device here at HiFi Blog HQ. We were let-down a bit when we found out that it reproduces videos at a not-so-great 15FPS rate (human eyes interpret 30FPS+ sequences as a continuous, fluid movement), but when we watched that [...]