Tenth Anniversary of First Commercial MP3 Player

Pickens writes "The first commercially released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was launched in March 1998 — the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems with 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful of songs encoded at 128Kb/s. In the US, local supplier Eiger Labs wanted $250 for the F10, though the price fell to $200 the following year prompted by the release of the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300. The Rio was released in September 1998, but by 8 October had become the subject of a lawsuit from the RIAA which claimed the player violated the 1992 US Home Recordings Act. It was later ruled that the Rio had not infringed the Act because it was not responsible for the actions of its customers. Thanks to its lesser known name, the F10 avoided such legal entanglements, but at the cost of all the free publicity its rival gained from the lawsuit."

I got my MPMan...

[greg_barton]

...about the same time I signed up for my slashdot account. :) I couldn't wait to buy the thing, but I eventually got an MP3 CD player to replace it. Couldn't beat 650MB of MP3's at your fingertips.

And to think of it now...

[Coopjust]

Yeah, it was a few years after the first MP3 player, but more than anything the iPod launch was the real catalyst. I was one of the naysayers who thought "What the hell is Apple thinking?!?!?!" when the iPod came out. Guess the joke is on me, because I'm now an owner of that market dominating family of MP3 players.

The 6th birthday of the Personal Video Player is coming up in June. This is interesting, because legal video content is still a developing market. Apple is getting their feet wet with TV Shows and movies, but I believe that music stores were more developed in 2004 than video stores are now. In this market, I think that digital video download competitors still have a chance against Apple though. Especially if some big names like Tivo and Microsoft team up. I'd find it hard to purchase an iPod Touch if I could play Tivo recordings on a WMV player as a part of Tivo service. It'd make the $20 for the DVR + Video use totally worth it.

Oh, of course the redundant No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

And now you can get 32GB flash

[rolfwind]

for under $200!
http://www.pricewatch.com/flash_card_memory/usb_32gb.htm [pricewatch.com]

An increase of capacity at around roughly 1000x in a decade. I don't know if the trend will continue.... but if it does we'll be at 32TB in another decade.

I guess even those who don't use music players can be thankful for those devices as they, along with digital cameras, were really were the commercial products on the market that really sold and pushed the flash envelope. Sure there were PDAs/GPS units and other stuff, but in comparison they really niche markets that were happy with 256MB or whatever in most cases. Now things like the airbook (and all the SSD notebooks to follow, yes there were earlier ones I know), iPhone and the convergence of devices will further drive the market for more space.

Re:And to think....

[Anonymous Coward]

Me? In the same place and more 'peers'.

Re:Crippleware

[sleeponthemic]

At that stage - neither, I'd have chosen the cassette player :)

Seconded

[rincebrain]

I'm enjoying my MPMan (well, actually, an F20V, not the F10, to be accurate) - I've had a Zen, an iPod, and a few other things, but I keep coming back to the F20V like an old friend.

Even though it only takes data transfer over proprietary parallel.

Even though it doesn't support VBR MP3s because it apparently doesn't support some bitrates.

Because it hasn't broken in almost a decade of use.