Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
Q4 financial results and conference call notes
$230.9M in sales ($305.4M a year ago)
$12.7M net loss ($31.9M a year ago)
Verdict? Betten than last year, but stil… Michael from epiZENter also jotted some notes from the conference call—interesting to see they’re pushing the X-Fi technology, talking about a future product that is connected to the Zen Vision:M [...]
Craig McHugh, president of the U.S. unit of Creative Labs, says they’re looking at all of their alternatives, and “we’d be very open to discussing with other companies who would like to use our user interface in their products or future products.” (emphasis mine). In other words, if you pay, they’ll play.
In Forbes [via], he’s [...]
The United States Patent and Trademark Office never ceases to amaze. Yesterday it granted Creative the so-called “Zen Patent” (U.S. Patent 6,928,433):
Creative’s invention for the user interface for portable media players enables selection of at least one track in a portable media player as a user sequentially navigates through a hierarchy using three or more [...]