Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
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.
Toshiba’s Gigabeat S (video – pictures) seemed to be one of the best products displayed at CES.
First reports claim this PMC’s 2.4-inch (320×240) QVGA LCD does a fine job displaying DRM’d MPEG-2 videos—so it’ll work with video subscription services such as Vongo—as well as TiVo Series 2 downloads. The device, which feels light and sturdy, [...]
Toshiba won’t deliver 0.85-inch hard drives till 2007 [via]
Apple secures flash memory supplies till 2010 (and leaves no doubt as to who 0wnz the market now): “Apple on Monday announced that it has reached long-term supply agreements with Hynix, Intel, Micron, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba to secure the supply of NAND flash memory through 2010.” Apple will prepay its suppliers $1.5Bn in the [...]
Toshiba announced [via] their Gigabeat P-series today. We’ve got two flash-based models, the P5L and P10L with 512MB/1GB capacity respectively.
Measuring 31.9×82.0×13.2mm and weighing 50g, these support MP3/WMA/WMA DRM (no subscription services support, we fear), carry a 1.1’’ color OLED screen (which you can use to view pictures) and use Gigabeat’s typical cross-shaped touchpad for navigation. [...]
Apple going for third memory supplier: Samsung and Toshiba, its main flash memory suppliers, to be joined by South-Korea based Hynix Semiconductor. The manufacturer will take over the 512MB/1GB chips (used on the iPod shuffle).
Side-fact: things to get better for memory chips’ supply and demand in December.