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Music Media Hardware

iRiver to Build In-Dash Digital HD Players 216

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-many-cool-devices dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like iRiver is going to take over where the Rio Car left off. Their CEO announced today that they are near completion on a new plant in China that will produce HD-based in-dash digital music players for automobiles. The new plant can push out 700K units a month. With the iPod dominating the digital portable market, iRiver sees this as a wide-open area they can move into. According to MacWorld iRiver is the third leading seller of MP3 portables with 5.6% of the market, following the number two seller Rio which holds 6.4% of the market. And the Apple iPod? No surprise, only a whopping 65.8% of all units shipped. 92% if you only count HD portables."
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iRiver to Build In-Dash Digital HD Players More

iRiver to Build In-Dash Digital HD Players

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  • Misleading marketshare numbers (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:24AM (#10512130)
    These numbers cover only US and are based on August sales. Since the new Ipod was recently launched, it isn't suprised that it sold well in the August.

    Apple's global marketshare in the digital audio player market is about 20%.

    • Re:Misleading marketshare numbers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HoneyBunchesOfGoats ( 619017 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:35AM (#10512170)
      You're quick to knock Apple's statistics, but where do yours come from?

      • Re:Misleading marketshare numbers (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Google cache [google.com] of a Yahoo story.

        "The company said it held a 10 percent share of the global market for MP3 players in the June quarter, coming second after Apple's 17 percent share."
        • It is my understanding that their marketshare of hard drive based players is much higher than 20%.

          - 40% of tracked retail Mp3 player sales in Europe/ America/ Japan, though figures elsewhere are lower
          - Over 10% of MP3 decoder chips made are used for manufacture of iPods

          Those sales figures are still a bit misleading- they reflect Apple's performance against flash players, which they do not make.

          Even if recent news reports are correct and those figures are high, Apple still remains overwhelmingly dominant
          • Those sales figures are still a bit misleading- they reflect Apple's performance against flash players, which they do not make.

            No, your quotes are misleading.. The figures are based on portable compressed music players which the iPod is one of many.
            Why is the subset of HD based player even need to be considered seperately? I mean, it is a portable music player just like the others. You could break it down further and claim the iPod is has 99.9% of the HD based players that are white. Does that reall

      • 78.5% of all statistics are made up on the spot...

    • Here is an interesting market share tidbit from an article [osviews.com] OSViews.com:

      Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said today that based on a survey of 600 teenagers, Apple's iPod is dominating "mindshare and market share." Munster said in a research note that of all the high school students surveyed, 16 percent currently own an iPod and 24 percent plan to buy an iPod within the next year. Munster also noted that the iPod ranked fourth on the teens' holiday wish list--behind clothes, money, and a car--even though

  • open markets (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cwebb1977 ( 650175 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:26AM (#10512136) Homepage
    Any market can be regarded as "wide open" if you have products of superior quality. Well, unless you face a big bad wolf-like company or state-owned monopolist that's giving you plenty of headaches and lawsuits.

    • Re:open markets (Score:2, Insightful)

      by iezhy ( 623955 )
      i seriously doubt if new products from rio and other newcomers can be considered superior quality (in terms of audio quality) comparing them to products (usualy cd/mp3 players) produced by experianced car audio system manufacturers (like pioneer, blaupunkt and etc.)
    • Any market can be regarded as "wide open" if you have products of superior quality.

      OK, then lets define the superior quality thing here and see how wide open the market becomes.

      A HD based player that has 1) Wireless and wired connectivity (don't care, ethernet, usb, firewire) 2) Upgradeable/hackable firmware 3) ogg/wma/flac/ normal formats 4) RCA and optical lines out/in 5) gapless/crossfaded playback 6) random playback by folder/album 7) less than $500.

      1st one that does this gets my money.

      Oh, and the

  • No wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ayn0r ( 771846 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:26AM (#10512138)
    No wonder iPod has the lead. iRiver HD players really are great, and they sound better than iPods, but unfortunately they're still a bit pricey in comparison. The only contender atm would be Rio Karma, but for those not feeling like smashing them repeatedly every now and then the Karma isn't really an option... About time someone put an effort into car MP3 playback - I'm surprised it hasn't been done properly earlier.

    • Re:No wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Animekiksazz ( 653048 )
      The iRiver H120 is only $20-30 more than the 20 gig iPod, I'd spend the $20-30 for the extras.
    • What?

      60 GBytes not enough for you? Gapless playback not good enough? 4V pre-outs useless? 4x5 or 2x10 fully parametric EQ too shabby?

      It was done 'properly' years ago.
    • I call bullshit on sounds better. The iPod has one of the best preamps out there as has been noted all over including an article several months back here on slashdot. Add to that the fact that the iPod can do 320kbps MP3's or Apple Lossless decoding I think you will have a hard time finding ANYTHING that sounds much better than an iPod with good headphones, let alone another portable.
    • Not more expensive.. I was looking in to this the other day, and a 20GB iPod is $389 CAD (after my edu discount) while the iRiver HP-120 is $439. Yes it's $50 more, BUT I get the remote and carrying case with the device, accessories that cost $45 each at the Apple store. So in fact the iRiver comes out a bit cheaper after the accessories, and even cheaper if you don't have an edu discount.
  • I've been using an Empeg (rio car) for about a year now, and they truely are incredible machines considering they were produced 5 years ago. Not many people cruise around with two 12gb drives and a 220mhz strongARM linux box in their cars :-).

    I mean can YOU telnet into your stereo system? Seriously though, I look forward to see what new things they come out with as it is sorta hard to explain to passengers that no, they can't buy one of these anymore.
    • True but you can buy mini-itx PC cases in card stereo form factor now and roll your own with added support for video, gps ....
      • Yeah, but there's lots of niceties that the PC solution doesn't immediately address including;

        4V line outs for better SQ.
        Fully parametric EQ for better SQ.
        Credit card remote so your passengers can search for music.
        Incredible player software with a UI designed for car use.
        Well integrated into the car's power scheme. Constant 12V, switched 12V and illumination sense are all handled intelligently, out of the box.
        Cool visuals.

        And yes, we've hacked in GPS too. Admittedly, with a 32x128 2-bit color screen and t
      • that's a bunch of bullshit, mini-itx has no where near the hardware funcationality to handle mobile setups.

        The empeg has special kernel hooks, and power controls to handle dips in car power. Car voltages fluctuate wildly while starting. The empeg also stores state in a small flash area which is controled by a kernel module to make sure the thing can start where it left off on next boot.

        I'd like to see you stuff a mini-itx board, power supply, laptop drive, shock mounting, and display in a single din das

  • Cool, but (Score:2, Funny)

    by PDA_Boy ( 821746 )
    which will crash first- the player, or the car?

    • Re:Cool, but (Score:2, Funny)

      by erick99 ( 743982 )
      If the car crashes and won't start up, try slamming the car down firmly onto a flat surface and the car should start up. Each time that the car crashes and won't start up and you slam it down on a flat surface it will go longer before crashing again.

  • iriver mini? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by geeber ( 520231 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:32AM (#10512160)
    Anybody know if iriver plans a competitor to the ipod mini? I have an iriver flash player that I absolutely love, but I am jonesing for 4 Gb of storage. Their little 1 Gb circular player was a little too soon and too small in capacity. However, I don't want to give up my FM radio and I don't want one of the bigger 20 Gb players. So I keep waiting...

  • DAMN! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by red5 ( 51324 ) <gired5@gmai3.14159l.com minus pi> on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:37AM (#10512181) Homepage Journal
    iRiver is the third leading seller of MP3 portables with 5.6% of the market, following the number two seller Rio which holds 6.4% of the market. And the Apple iPod? No surprise, only a whopping 65.8% of all units shipped.

    Reminds me of the old adage: "Second place is the first loser"

    I always thought that was a rather annoying way to look at it. In this case I think it applies. 65.8 : 6.4 is just over a factor of ten. Damn Apple really does dominate that market. Hopefully this works out for iRiver. Otherwise there probably not going to last long. They're getting creamed (at 5.6%).

    Though I suppose one can say by the same logic Apple is getting creamed in the computer market. Though I wonder how their numbers compare to other vendors (ei Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony, etc) as opposed to apple vs. the entire PC market.
    • The numbers are for America only though. iRiver is a Korean company, who are very big domenstically and also big in Europe (probably larger than Apple).

      Interestingly, those numbers would indicate that HD based players dominate in America (dividing gives 70%) while I am quite convinced that both in volume and value flash based players dominate completely here. iPod's are still relatively rare, but a small flash player on a necklace has become the latest necessary fashion accessory.

  • Correction (Score:4, Interesting)

    by geighaus ( 670864 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:41AM (#10512199)
    These numbers are applicable for the US. I guess the situation is a bit different on a worldwide scale, as iPods are not an "in" thing in Europe by any standards, as well as fairly unknown here in Finland.

  • Networking - The Missing Piece (Score:5, Insightful)

    by superid ( 46543 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:49AM (#10512224) Homepage
    I don't want to yank my player out of the dash when I want to add songs. I want to drive my car into my garage and have it present on my home network. Then from my desktop I will drag/drop songs to the car.

    Why the heck is it taking the auto industry so long to add simple network connectivity to cars? I know it's a price sensitive market, and potentially a security problem, but I've been anticipating this "no brainer" option for years....where is it???

    • I don't want to yank my player out of the dash when I want to add songs. I want to drive my car into my garage and have it present on my home network. Then from my desktop I will drag/drop songs to the car.

      A friend of mine has the older Rio car unit, and he loves it. But I wasn't so sure about getting one (and they went off the market). I ended up waiting a year or so to see how the MP3/CD players would fare. There were only a couple models out at the time, but now there are tons. I picked up a Blaupu

      • Your wish list is a lot like mine.

        I have a JVC MP3/CD player that I put in my car back in 2001. Probably the best investment I've ever made with regards to enjoyment value (worked perfectly on my two-week road trip). Easy to change CDs if you want different music and each CD holds 6-10 hours worth. I probably carry 400 hours worth of music in the car (10 CDs up on the visor, another 40 in a pair of thin nyoprolene(?) CD cases).

        DVD-R would be very nice, then I could have a real 1980s disc rather then
    • I don't want to yank my player out of the dash when I want to add songs. I want to drive my car into my garage and have it present on my home network. Then from my desktop I will drag/drop songs to the car.

      But why do you want an extra player in the car, anyway? I want to have one mobile player, which I can use at home, in the subway, when walking... and when I drive in my car I want to connect to my car stereo and have access to all the music and all the playlists I can listen to in other situations. Of c

    • OmniFi: The solution (Score:3, Informative)

      by ajlitt ( 19055 )
      This is what you're looking for. [omnifimedia.com] It gives you the option to either sync with your home PC via 802.11b at regular intervals or to copy files via USB to the drive caddy. It's Linux based, though you need a Windows app to enable the wireless sync. It's also not particularly cheap. Still, this sounds like what you're looking for.

    • I don't want to yank my player out of the dash when I want to add songs

      I think there's a larger group of people who don't mind this. Including those who don't have a home wireless network, or can't get their car close enough (live in a large apartment complex) for a good signal, or simply those who're already comfortable with plugging the player into the computer to upload songs: iPod owners.

      I've always thought the ideal car player would accept an iPod. Yeah, I've seen the connectors you can buy. That'

  • ipod in car (Score:3, Insightful)

    by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:50AM (#10512231) Homepage Journal
    I bet if apple had an actual kit to put an ipod in a car rather than all the hacker mods that are out there it would help in that area.

    Personally, I don't want a device just for my car. I want one I can have in my car, home and anywhere else I go.

  • HD Based Car Players (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Silwenae ( 514138 ) * on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:51AM (#10512235) Homepage
    I have an Omnifi [omnifimedia.com] for my home and car.

    The car version, a 20GB hard drive that I had professionally installed under my rear passenger seat, lasted a week. Made by Rockford-Fosgate, in a large case to support the hard drive, you would think it could take the bumps and shocks of the road. It couldn't.

    It would skip when I would hit a bump, even at 15 miles per hour pulling into the gas station. At the point it would skip, it would lock up for 30 seconds, then resume, but every 30 seconds would pause for another 30 seconds. Ejecting the hard drive and putting it back in would reset it to the point of the bump, then it would play fine until I hit another bump.

    The pro's of the unit were you could plug a USB 802.11b card into the casing, and automatically transfer your music wirelessly right into your garage. If you didn't have a wireless network, you could eject the hard drive and it had a USB port to hook up to your PC. It had a really slick interface in the car, and setting up a wireless network over the in-dash spin dial thing was a breeze, they did a a really good job with that, with the different ways you could input your WEP key.

    The cons were the bumping of the car made it pause, the USB wireless network adapter just kind of hung out in your car, no where to mount it. And the software interface on a Windows pc (SimpleCenter) was one of the most horrid music applications I have ever used. And it didn't do Ogg.

    I'm skeptical of any hard drive based car player until they can more than account for the shocks and bumps, and it needs to come with some kind of warranty plan. How long will those hard drives last?

    • I wonder what kind of hd was used in those units? I have a roll-your-own mini-itx setup in my trunk. The OS drive is a 1Gb CompactFlash card and the media drive is a 30Gb Hitachi 2.5" laptop HD. To date (just over a year) I have not had any problems with the HD skipping or crashing. I drive a Prelude that is regularly abused by numerous potholes and the laptop HD has taken the beatings well. I have experienced problems with the touchscreen in the dash due to summer heat, but no issues with the HD.

      If your

    • You've been burned by that one experience, but don't discount HD based car players completely. Other solutions exist that don't suffer from HD failures. I've had 2 30GB drives in my empeg for over two and a half years without a failure. Now they are laptop drives (designed for shock) and they are mounted in an anti-shock cradle (empeg design), so that probably helps. Of the >4000 empeg players in the wild, only a few have ever suffered HD failures.
    • I'm thinking the cold of our northeast winters would not be good for the hard drive(I live in upstate NY). I suppose you could remove it from the dash every day but I'm sure I'd forget and end up with a frozen drive.
    • Current HD's are quite capable of handling the very mild bumps and such that a vehicle goes through. Even the worst shaking and jarring you get from a pothole are far less than a typical laptop must handle being dropped an inch onto a desktop.

      What concerns me much more, is this idea of connecting up an 802.11 card to the car. How long will it be till my car alarm gets a virus, making it scream "H4VE Y0U TR1ED HERBAL V1AGRA? FREE 5AMPLE!" to pedestrians.

  • I can't understand why they don't sell more.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MikeHunt69 ( 695265 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:58AM (#10512269) Journal
    If you put aside emotions for a minute and do a side-by-side comparison, the iRiver is much better than the iPod. The only thing the iPod maybe wins on is the user interface - and I've had absolutely no problems with my H340 iRiver.

    But the thing that closed the deal for me? USB hosting. I no longer have to lug my laptop around on holiday because I can plug my camera into the iRiver and store the files on it's internal HD. All the colour screen, upgradable firmware, internal mic, radio, remote control, not needing custom software by appearing as just another drive, etc. is just icing on the cake.

    • A list of things that cause the iPod to win out in the mainstream market (read: average, non-computer person).
      • Many people would rather NOT have an FM tuner
      • Mainstream folks do not care about recording capabilities
      • Nor do they care about Vorbis
      • Apple's UI extends to the physical unit itself, which people seem to adore, which includes iTunes, a much nicer interface and library manager than "just another drive"" (which the iPod can support just for data, or with music with free third party utilities)

      The U

    • Bose sells a lot of speakers, too.

    • "Only" user interface? ARG!!! I cannot understand why user interface seems a secondary consideration to the Slashdot crowd. In case no one remembers, portable MP3 players were pretty much limited to us geeks before the iPod came along. Why? Because the interfaces were terrible. Sure, there are other reasons the iPod succeeded with the masses (sexiness + marketing blitz), but I believe the excellent user interface was primary among them. Heck, I'm a computer engineer and I don't care how many bells an

  • Interface (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TrippTDF ( 513419 ) <hiland AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @08:00AM (#10512284)
    The user interface had better be clear, simple and easy to use while driving, or no one is going to get one of these. Based on my small iRiver experiance, I don't see that happening.

  • Obvious call for Wifi (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @08:02AM (#10512289)
    Various people have spoken about wifi in digital media players (including Apple advertising for wifi engineers to work on future iPods) but this is a real case for it.

    A car media player with a Wifi link would be ideal as the owner could then download tracks to it without the need either to walk a laptop out to the car or the car stereo back to the house.

    the benefits of being able to browse people's music collections while driving would be entirely incidental ;-)

  • Input jack (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fossa ( 212602 ) <pat7@g[ ]net ['mx.' in gap]> on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @08:07AM (#10512317) Journal

    Can someone please make a car with a stereo that has an audio input? Does such a thing exist even in aftermarket? Assuming I already have a portable music player, I could just plug it in to my car stereo. Instead, I'm stuck using some pathetic mini FM transmitter, or cassette adapter if I have a cassette deck, or buying a whole new HD car stereo.

    *sigh*

    • Re:Input jack (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @08:27AM (#10512437) Homepage Journal
      Yes, several manufacturers have aux inputs of one form or another. My Sony stereo I had a decade ago had an aux input on the front of the unit. My current stereo (the factory-installed Alpine unit in my Mercury) does not have an aux input per se, but has support for a CD jukebox, and there is an aftermarket aux input box that fakes the head-end unit out into thinking it is a CDDJ - thus giving me tape, in-dash CD, and my OpenNEO35 80G MP3 player.

      I agree with you on the FM transmitter and cassette adapter - they bite rocks and suck. The FM units are usually NOT crystal or synthesized and drift all over the place, as well as the built-in limitation of 15kHz due to the way stereo multiplex works, and the cassette adapters have neither good base nor good treble response. I could not believe the difference when I got the CDDJ box installed.

      Personally, I'd like to see the high-end car stereo manufactures put in a 3.5mm aux jack on the front, a pair of RCA's on the back, and a Bluetooth receiver - but that is about as likely as seeing a good candidate for president. I've got the hot tea, anybody have an atomic vector plotter?
    • JVC KD-SX980 [jvc.com]

      I'm giving you only one example, as that's the one I have in my car. It plays MP3s out of CD-R/RWs and it has an analog audio input for the iPods and alikes.

      I got mine a couple of years ago, for less than the suggested $250, and it's still going strong, no reason to change it.
    • I know that at least the Honda Element has an 1/8" input to the stereo, and my aftermarket expensive car stereo head unit has RCA inputs that come in as an AUX input. I've had the car stereo over a year and I'm still waiting for a decent portable unit to plug into it. If you build it it will come kind of thing.
    • Can someone please make a car with a stereo that has an audio input?

      I've had a bunch of aftermarket head units that have auxilary audio inputs. I'd actually be really surprised if you spent over 200 bucks on a head unit and DIDN'T have an aux input or even two. Usually the wires are in the BACK, so you'd have to run them to a jack out front for the use you're looking for, but real estate on the front of the unit is pretty tight, so it's probably going to be your only option for a while.

    • Re:Input jack (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RPI Geek ( 640282 )
      Check out this site [logjamelectronics.com]. They sell converters so that you can plug just about anything through their converters and then right into the head unit without FM transmitters / modulators: you get dual RCA jacks.

      I found this site yesterday because I'm in this market. I want to build a small ITX carputer and hopefully mount it in my new '04 Civic HX so that the car still looks stock. It'll have 802.11x and a removable HD, and I'd LIKE to tie it into the stock head unit so that I can change songs using the regula
    • Can someone please make a car with a stereo that has an audio input? Does such a thing exist even in aftermarket?

      Many do. Most stereos I have seen have some sorta odd connector on the back. This is often poorly documented, or if it's documented it's labled as a "cd-changer" or "equaliser" connector. My stereo for example takes a 13pin din connector, and I can easily spend $20 for it to line outs, or order the plug from digikey for a good deal less.

    • For the life of me I can't figure out why no one has offered a headunit that supports USB jump drives.

      They're so damned ubiquitous nowadays -- just a single USB port to plug in media -- a card reader (for CompactFlash cards), a jump drive, etc. Let the end-user deal with buying the storage, I just want a unit that PLAYS what I put into it.

      Is this REALLY TO MUCH TO ASK FOR??

      I've seen a grand total of ONE manufacturer that has a unit with a USB input, and it goes for over $3000. And there's no internal a

  • Good for low-end (Score:2, Insightful)

    by grunt107 ( 739510 )
    Since all digital music formats on these devices have some compression, audio quality will suffer. Maybe not discernable to most ears, but it is still there.

    The large HD device is commendable for portability, but I would also like to see cars retain at least a CD-player. It is also time to get the better-than-CD audio formats into mass-production and use. A DVD-Audio/MP3/Sat/Radio auto system would be ideal.
  • I surely hope they ramp-up on their support staff. Has anyone ever had to call iRiver? I did. I honestly think that they've got maybe 4 people working there. This includes management.

    And their support department's sucky-ness rivals LinkSys.

  • Pioneer has one... (Score:2, Informative)

    by BStocknd ( 762377 )
    I'm surprised no one has mentoned the Pioneer DEH-P90HDD [pioneerelectronics.com]. This is a head unit that will play from an internal 10 GB hard drive, memory stick, or an audio/mp3 cd. Nice looking player, and I've alwaysed loved Pioneer, but it isn't cheap.. $500 to $600 on ebay.
  • I ran out of Empeg/Rio Car units, and need something for my new car. If this is even half as good as the Empeg, I'll be happy.
  • I mean, really. they are like 99% of the way there. They have a dock. they have the airport express with wireless. Make a deck that will show up on my mac, lemme drag my songs over to it, and you are good to go. Or make a deck that I can slot my ipod into. OUt of mind, out of sight.
  • Except for the hdd based palyers that are hardwired, and use WiFi to xfer music, my 10-disc CD/MP3 changer is the best solution I've seen. I carry around about 115hrs of music with me constantly. It's nice having all of 50Cent, 2Pac, and Eminem's stuff ride along with Garbage, and Audioslave. It's a little mini-melting pot, and it only cost me $110 and the time to install it.

    -bZj

  • empeg (Score:2)

    by SuperQ ( 431 ) *
    I've been using my empeg since 2000, and after 4 years of running strong, there is still no other product out there that comes ANYWHERE near the quality or functionality of it. The 12gig drive is starting to feel a bit small, but with room for 2 laptop drives, adding a 40gig drive seems like nothing. As others on the empegbbs feel, Rio has droped the ball by not doing any new development in the car audio arena. They only made 4500 empegs, and everyone thinks they gave up way too fast on them.

    I worry abo
  • So now that I can play HD in my car, I need to rearranged the dash- get rid of the not-so-content-rich odometer and gas gauge and so on to be able to fit the plasma screen in.
  • It would seem to me that a simple USB port and the ability to read the structure or database off a mass-storage compliant digital audio player would give you full artist/title browse access and full playback of anything from a thumbdrive to a 60GB player.

    The catch is that the 65+% iPod isn't mass-storage compliant, and their wire remote protocol is proprietary.

    It shouldn't cost much: if I can have a DVD player that sits on my home ethernet and reads anything uPNP, plays DVDs in progressive scan, has full

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