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Music Media

Treó 10: Another Portable Mass Storage Device 339

Posted by michael from the stocking-stuffer dept.
mblase writes: ""The Treó 10 is a lightweight, pocket-sized, digital music jukebox with the capacity to store over 3,000 songs - that's 150 hours of music." It's got twice the hard-drive space of Apple's iPod, but also half the RAM, half the battery life, and uses a much slower USB connection instead of FireWire. However, it's PC-compatible using MusicMatch Jukebox right out of the box, and costs only $250 instead of $400 for the iPod. CNet's article compares the two further."
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Treó 10: Another Portable Mass Storage Device More

Treó 10: Another Portable Mass Storage Device

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  • Yeah??? (Score:1, Funny)

    by b_pretender ( 105284 )
    But it doesn't have Steve Jobs behind it, jumping up and down.

    The RIAA will probably try and stop it's production since it tends to do that with non-Apple MP3 software.

    • Re:Yeah??? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by znu ( 31198 )
      I'm betting that whatever method it uses to transfer files from the computer isn't nearly as slick as the iPod's iTunes syncing.
  • Music all of the time! and Everywhere!

    When do they go on sale?

  • nothing special here (Score:4, Troll)

    by NotAnotherReboot ( 262125 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:41PM (#2663211)
    This post doesn't really warrant being on the front page of slashdot really; there's already portable MP3 players with hard drives. It's no surprise that more would come out. Just because it looks slightly like the ipod doesn't mean it's any more special than another mp3 player. It's good that more of these are getting to market, but I see nothing revolutionary here, or news worthy for that matter.

    • Re:nothing special here (Score:4, Offtopic)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @10:33PM (#2663417)
      BTW, Music Match sucks. The only good thing about Music Match is that it is fairly easy to use, which is why I used to use it. Here are some of my complaints about Music Match:

      • It is buggy as hell. The super high quality setting (in advanced recording options) actually creates terrible quality mp3s. See Analysis link of http://www.r3mix.net for more info. I encoded several CDs before I realized this. Boy was I pissed. I then switched to EAC and Lame (which produces better quality mp3s anyway). The people at Music Match apparently care more about adding lots of skins/gizmos/useless features, rather than making software that actually works.

      • It will nag and nag you until you make it the default media player for all the file types it supports. Very annoying.

      • The unregistered version is crippled anyway (rips and encodes slow, must register to speed up). Also displays annoying pop-up windows when exiting.

  • Mp3 player || PDA Phone (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sPaKr ( 116314 )

    How long will it be before handpring and these morons start dukeing it out over the 'so cool' term Treo? They are booth personal electronic devices, looks like trademark overlap to me
    but IANAL.
    • one is tee - ar - 'ee with an accent' - oh.

      the other is tee - ar - ee - 'oh with an accent.'

      both are registered with upto, 'parently.

  • which usb? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Faceprint ( 2612 )
    Does this thing use USB, or USB 2.0? From what I understand, there's a HUGE speed difference.

    • Re:which usb? (Score:2, Informative)

      by mgv ( 198488 )
      There is a huge difference. USB approximately 1.2 Mb/sec, USB 2.0 approx 50 Mb/sec IIRC.

      It doesn't say, so its probably not USB 2.0. You would say it if it had it.

      That means it will be slow to transfer the files, but not a disaster to do so.

      Michael

  • 3000 Songs!? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's an unreal number of songs. I went to a BBQ the other weekend and was surprised to find out this guy had over 2600 songs that he had downloaded between napster and morpheus. I have a measly 120! Does anyone see themselves loading this bad boy up with that much music? Is this just a waste?
    • Huh? I have computer in my trunk [opensores.org] with a 40 GB hard drive. Right now it's at around 75% capacity, and has ~4000 songs (in the days of napster, I was the uber-leech... though I must say I've bought atleast 50 CDs from stuff I've downloaded... but that's another story).

      Personally, I wish the PR droids would stop assuming everyone in the world used 128 kb/s encoding for their music. I prefer to use 192 kb/s when encoding, and usually don't download anything but. Really, 128 kb/s sounds like absolute shit over any decent sound system. I suppose if you're just listening with "ear buds" or some crappy $10 headphones, it doesn't make a difference. The 10 GB "embedded" drive in this device says 3000? Assuming that is at 128 kb/s (could be less), that's 2000 -- not 3000. When you have a decent album collection, 2000 is not much of anything.

      In retrospect... nah, there's no way that "3000" figure could even be 128 kb/s for a 10 GB drive... it must be something lower like 96 kb/s (which means only 1500 songs at 192 kb/s). Still better than carrying around a CD player, but if you're using this in your car, just roll your own damn mp3 player [opensores.org]. It impresses the chicks.
      • there's no way that "3000" figure could even be 128 kb/s for a 10 GB drive... it must be something lower like 96 kb/s

        Interesting.
        I noticed that Apple was using a standard file rate of 192 kb/s for their marketing figures. Looks like they expect people to use the highest quality, while other companies marketing dept.s expect people to use the crappiest quality.

        I bet this bites Apple on the ass.

        Rather like when the used to measure all of their monitors by the *viewable/useable* space, NOT the size of the glass. Every other company used the (misleading) size of the glass, and that left them trying to explain that their 13.3" was the same as a 14 or 15" monitor.

        To me it is more honest to measure the storage size in terms of "real world" quality or monitors in terms of the actual viewable space you get.
        But the marketing droids take over, streching the truth as much as they can, which means every one has to also in order to compete.

    • Before I stopped purchasing music (read: new stuff sucking), I had amassed over 300 cd's alone. This was on top of the 200 or so cassettes that I owned, bought before I owned a CD player, and very few of these duplicated each other. I stopped buying music around age 23 or so. At that point I 'owned' over 5000 songs alone (500 albums * 10 songs average per).


      If I were to have continued to purchase music, with the money I have these days, I'd be well over 10,000 songs. And I'm damn picky in terms of what I like. If 3,000 songs seems like a lot, you have very, very select tastes in music, or not much money.

  • Fortune cookie tells financial future... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fortune Master ( 540773 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:43PM (#2663221)
    You will be overwhelmed by "gadget craze" and forget that carrying an IDE drive around is cheaper. Poverty to follow.

  • What is it with that name (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:43PM (#2663222) Homepage
    So is there any legal overlap between the Treo that is a handheld PDA/phone (which could potentially end up with an mp3 attachment) and the Treo that is a handheld mp3 player? Ohhh, wait, I see. The former has an accent over the 'e' whereas the latter's is on the 'o'. As observed by JC's [jc-news.com]

    • Re:What is it with that name (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @10:00PM (#2663300) Homepage
      So is there any legal overlap between the Treo that is a handheld PDA/phone (which could potentially end up with an mp3 attachment) and the Treo that is a handheld mp3 player? The former has an accent over the 'e' whereas the latter's is on the 'o'.

      No. As hard as it is to understand for people who only know English, accents really matter -- they aren't just there for show -- there are words in many languages that only differ by an accent.
  • Archos, http://www.archos.com, has been in the game for awhile now. They have a handy 20-gig Jukebox Studio 20 MP3 Player & Hard Drive, http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_500205.h tml, that dare I say rocks. Still uses USB, but it nice to not only carry your MP3 collection around, but also have a handy transport for all your big files. I have the Jukebox 6000 now, but I am hoping that St. Nick will remember my letter and hook me up with a Studio.
  • It seems like this is the first in many similar products that will be on the market. This is from here [otcbbnn.com]

    -- The Company demonstrated OEM licensee Musical ElectronicsLtd.'s e.Digital-powered jukebox product scheduled to bebranded by one of Musical's OEM customers for sale through Circuit City and other retailers. This product will allow users to encode music files directly from a CD player, bypassing the need for a PC to perform digital compression.

    -- The hard-disk-drive (HDD) based music player product from OEM licensee EASTECH was demonstrated, and is slated for OEM branding.

    -- The Company demonstrated Maycom's MP2000 Internet music player, based on e.Digital's technology and reference design. The MP2000 product is scheduled to be sold on e.Digital's online store in time for the holidays.

    -- The Company announced that licensee Bang & Olufsen is readying product based on e.Digital technology for sale in their retail outlets worldwide.

  • Lovin' the iPod (Score:4, Flamebait)

    by jimhill ( 7277 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:44PM (#2663231) Homepage
    I ordered an iPod the day Apple announced it. So far since its arrival, I've taken it halfway across country patched into my car stereo, I've taken it hiking in the Jemez Mountains, I've tuned out all the banal MallMusik to get my Christmas shopping done without killing anyone, and I patch it into the ministereo in my bedroom so I can be lulled gently to sleep by whatever the randomizer kicks out.

    Oh, and I've got all my important OS X data backed up onto it.

    I'm completely sold on the iPod. This thing for me is to music what my TiVo is to TV: you'd have to kill me to get it outta my meaty paws.

    Now, for the Treo. USB? 10GB? Are they high? Syncing a portable to (in my case) a slightly less portable shouldn't ever be something that takes an overnighter plus to accomplish. That alone would kill the Treo for me.

    I'm guessing from the fact that special "music management" software is provided that there's some kind of DRM scheme involved. I like Apple's approach: every iPod comes in a plastic sleeve with "Don't steal music" on it. My machine. My ethical conundrum. They stayed out of it, as they should have.

    Still, it'll be nice to get some feedback from folks who've actually used one -- I'm especially curious about the DRM speculation.

    • Re:Lovin' the iPod (Score:3, Informative)

      by sulli ( 195030 )
      I love my iPod too. Now that I have iPod Free File Access (freeware) the one big problem, that you can't transfer songs iPod->Mac, is solved - and the sound quality is very nice (though a little quiet in the car via a tape adapter), and the capacity, battery life, and form factor kick ass. Buy one if you have a Mac with Firewire, you won't regret it.
  • What is special here? Why is this notable at all? I don't really follow the comparison to the iPod. As noted, it has half the battery life, a USB connection, is larger, and is missing all the great Apple industrial design. The only thing that I have seen in this article is the comparison to the Handspring Treo name, and maybe the form factor.

  • Not Just Your MP3 Player (Score:4, Interesting)

    by darkPHi3er ( 215047 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:46PM (#2663237) Homepage
    in the just completed (rather dull) Fall COMDEX, i spoke to a number of people who had iPod's, they all loved them, BUT, about half of them were using them as portable storage, in addition to their MP3 duties....

    most popular use was transferring movies to your iPod for viewing through your (apple, obviously) notebook.....

    at 10GB and 250$, this also becomes a good alternative for the Wintel crowd as a "Personal Storage Device"...

    you could put a movie file, some MP3/WMA's, TeleTubbie Pr0n, etc on this, your backups of key programs, data, etc...

    for the money this is a LOT cheaper (if slower -- til USB 2) then the 1394 external drives people (including me) have been buying and much more portable....

    what other uses can /.r's come up with????
    ......
    • Can you boot from it? Newer Macs can boot off of an iPod, which means you can install OS X on it, sit down at any Mac made in the last couple of years, hook it up, reboot, and have your setup up and running in around a minute.

      I guess it doesn't matter with the Treo; it would probably be too painfully slow to run a system off of a USB drive anyway.

      • ??? (Score:2, Funny)

        by autopr0n ( 534291 )
        Who the fuck needs to be able to boot from a god damn MP3 player?!

        This is a completely ridiculous feature...
        • Call it a firewire disk with a built in mp3 decoder. Being able to carry a complete system configuration (all your files, applications, your OS configuration, and all your settings) with you can be *very* useful.
          • Agreed. Even just from a convenience standpoint (go to lan party at friends who has a few imacs around, plug, boot, go (assuming mac people have lan parties =)) From a System Support/HelpDesk standpoint, this could be pretty handy for fieldwork, too, at least in some rather rare situations. Pretty high geek factor to this ability though.
    • for the money this is a LOT cheaper (if slower -- til USB 2)...

      Not the first time I've heard USB 2 mentioned like that. This device is not USB 2, and when (if?) everyone starts using USB 2, this device will still be plugging along at (theoretical peak) 12Mbps. Of course, an updated version of this device may support USB 2 (or, more likely, FireWire) eventually. By that time the updated iPod will probably have 20GB of storage capacity at 800Mbps.

  • Why is capacity measured in songs? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Angron ( 127881 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:53PM (#2663264) Journal
    Why is it that nearly every press release or announcement about a digital music playing device describes the storage capacity in terms of the number of songs it can hold? Since when is a 'song' a standard unit of measure? I personally use high bitrate (VBR, 128kbps floor, 320kbps ceiling, LAME) mp3's for most of my music, leaving me at about 1.5MB per minute of music. This usually results in their estimates being completely different from what I'd actually be able to put on the device.

    Another problem is that the bitrate can be dramatically different among the songs in someone's collection, ranging from 128kbps for some songs to a maximum 320kbps for others; yet these announcements completely ignore this! Are they afraid to tell us exactly how many MB or GB the device actually has? Or do they just seek to try and do simple math for us based on some predetermined 'common' bitrate?

    I want real measurements, not arbitrary ones. I don't buy cars that get "three full drives per every tank of gas", and I don't buy music players that hold "xxx minutes of music".

    -Angron

    • Why is it that nearly every press release or announcement about a digital music playing device describes the storage capacity in terms of the number of songs it can hold?

      Because then they can puff up the advertised capacity by using 2-minute songs coded at 64 Kbps. They mention the actual capacity in standard units (and even there they puff it up by using K=1000 instead of K=1024) in the fine print, and would avoid even that if they could get away with it.

      • If you read fine print (got my iPod poster outa the latest macworld) the measurement is taken with 4min songs at 10kbps. That's about avarage for the masses.

        On my poster, it is stated in one of the feature blurbs and not at the bottom in the fine print what the actual capacity is. They aren't out there to fool the consumer, if they were they'd have a lot of pissed off geeks comming after them. Ever wonder why the mac following is so great? It's because mac people know what they are talking about when it comes to computers (or have someone around them that does.) It's the same way with the linux community. Apple realizes this.

        Also, if everybody uses the K=1000 unit, wouldn't that be the standard? Stop whining about it.

    • Re:Why is capacity measured in songs? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nehril ( 115874 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @10:19PM (#2663367)
      because "songs" is actually a good way to describe approximate capacity to the average person. Try explaining "VBR, 128kbps floor, 320kbps ceiling, LAME" to your mother, along with a statistical analysis of how many femtoseconds of creative sonic intellectual property (or music) that gets you. And remind her of the difference between KBps and Kbps while you're at it.


      Or you get your head out of your pci slot, and say "about a thousand songs."

  • makes sense to me. Products that are worse and cost more don't survive.

    Battery life matter much to me, so I use my Minidisc (40 hrs aa per charge). Those these units definetly have there plusses.
    • Yeah, yeah, yeah. Price is often more a funtion of hype then anything else. Sure, they may not last. Ten years later your typical $100 gadget can be found selling for $3 at a garage sale. My brother in law got burn by minidisk. He bought early and expensive. The anti-skip was inadequate for jogging and the software was all crippled with Sony DAT type "you can't do what you want" stuff. Huh. I waited for normal CD players to support MP3 for cheap. I can jog with mine.

      I'm not that bright, however. I'm still suffering with LAME and NotLame notcompiles and I don't know how to write to my CD player with Linux. Because of that, I don't consider any of these things "PC" compatible. They are M$ compatible, the best example of overpriced hype that won't be here ten years from now.

  • http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/gadgets/57a3.shtmlT he Terapin Mine Handheld
    Uses ETHERNET and USB, runs linux and has 10 gigs of storage plus audio out and MP3 playing abilities. Now, why would you want a stinkin' ipod?
    • Geez, some people are just too ignorant to talk geeky hardware, it seems! If you'd taken the time to make the link clickable [thinkgeek.com] and read the goddamned specs [thinkgeek.com] for that device, you would have seen that it uses 10 Mbps Ethernet. Now, two things should have stricken you:
      • OMG, 10 Mbps is even less than the 12 Mbps of (theoretical) USB peak bandwidth!
      • OMG, 10 Mbps is 1/40:th of the (again, theoretical) FireWire/IEEE1394/i.Link peak bandwidth of 400 Mbps!!
      Taken together, these two facts might make you think that ThinkGeek's device, while possibly cool, does not beat the iPod when it comes to bandwidth, and in fact doesn't even beat the Treo. Clear? With that said, I must say the TV output is kind of a cool feature. ;^)

  • Similar announcements. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fireboy1919 ( 257783 ) <rustyp AT freeshell DOT org> on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:59PM (#2663289) Homepage Journal
    Sony has a laptop they call the "Vaio." It uses currently available technology in order to create a laptop. Its better than other ones, but more expensive.

    Nike makes shoes. They're better than others, but more expensive.

    McDonalds makes hamburgers. They taste good, but the ones from Steak & Shake taste better. However, they are more expensive.

    In a thriving industry with hundreds of products which have only a few distinguishing features, why is it worth mentioning one more?

    Perhaps this breaks some ground that I'm not aware of. If anyone has any insight, enlighten me.
    • Actually Vaios are cheaply made, they good great and have alot of nifty features. But they break, often.
      • About a month after the one year warranty period, my Vaio's plastic case cracked in one corner. Not too big a deal as everything is still working, just annoying to look at. Another couple months later and a small subset of the keys on the keyboard stop responding. Okay, got on Sony's factory support and ordered a new plastic plate and keyboard (at a cost of $250 total or so).

        Works great for another couple months, then one of the hinges for the display snaps clean off. Bleh! At this point, I wish I had just bought a new Thinkpad when my keyboard broke instead of sinking more money into repairing my stinkin Vaio.
    • I would agree that the announcement of new products is beginning to swap /. a little too much. Milestone releases like the iPod need to be main stories here to allow us to discuss them, but the second, third, fourth and fifth follow up clone are of little interest to most of us.

      This is worse in the PDA department, where seemingly every week we have a couple of new machines out, with the usual 'will it run linux' story. Little of the discussion is to do with function, mainly its to do with the sexiness of the product.

      Everyone knows that more women will consider sleeping with you if you run MacOS than any windows or linux flavour. They think your a 'middle seat' kind of guy by default, and you probably wash every day. So the iPod most likely has the same effect. So more of us want one!

      Lets have an experiment. All the single guys with iPods, and all the single guys with a similar device go out on Friday night and try to get laid. You have to wear your iPod / other at all times. We count the %age for each group to get a women into bed / a toilet cubicle in a club / car. My bet is iPod wins by a mile!

      Tip - Let the ladies touch the iPod - it feels sooo nice they'll get shivers! They'll confuse these feelings with feelings of attraction to you! A guaranteed result!

      Just make sure if you take them home that you warn your Mom not to wait up for you! That could scupper everything. Oh - and don't forget to get those party hats!

      • HOw exactly was the iPod a "Milestone release"? Creative had the nomad out for what, a year and a half? ANd guess what, it worked with PC's AND Macs! Imagine! The horror! I still odn't understand wht people are making syck a big freakin deal about the goddamned iPod. Only thing it has that a billion othe rproducts in its arean don't have is firewire, and thats with good reason... MOST PEOPLE DON'T HAVE FIREWIRE.

  • Neither the article nor the product web site have info on it, so I'll ask here: does the Treo have SDMI on it?

    If so, its instantly worthless.

  • Not a Mac fan but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pinkpineapple ( 173261 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @09:59PM (#2663292) Homepage
    ...I bought an iPod and got to admit that after passing the feeling of spending too much for not much more, I love the iPod.

    The not much more ends up making all the difference. Having a firewire drive I can carry with me and hot plug to my home machine and transfer music when I need it the most and the fastest I can before leaving home is just phenomenal.

    Having twice as much of memory gives me 20 mins of skip free music. A must for this symphonies. The size and design are just too good. Hummm, I love the click of the wheel of the jog shuttle. The interface is also simple and so convenient and so easy to use.

    Finally, the battery is a big winner: reloading the unit while connected to firewire, I never ran out of battery like I did all the time on a walkman or even a Rio.

    And little people know about the fact that there is a flash eeprom that stores the firmware OS of the machine and Apple plans to release a fix for early bugs, better experience. The other units, er, you just have to buy the new model sorry.

    I'll get the software that let's it connect to Windoz. Linux support is probably right at the corner when enough people will buy that device.

    Two thumbs up and I am lucky enough to have it before Christmas.
    • All that RAM in the iPod isn't really for skip protection. It's so that the hard drive can be spun down most of the time. That saves a ton of battery power, and vastly reduces the chances of the device getting damaged in a shock. If Apple has done things cleverly, I'd be surprised if the drive had to be spun up for more than a minute every hour (assuming you're just playing through a playlist, so the device knows what songs are coming up and can read ahead to load as many songs as will fit in RAM).

  • woo-hoo! (Score:5, Funny)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @10:01PM (#2663303)
    wow! bigger AND slower!
    but it runs under windows, so let's all party!
    *sigh*

    • Re:woo-hoo! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      but it runs under windows, so let's all party!

      Yeah, I don't see anything about it working on Mac or Linux either.

  • Let's submit in bytes, not "songs" or "hours" (Score:5, Informative)

    by dstone ( 191334 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @10:12PM (#2663349) Homepage
    with the capacity to store over 3,000 songs - that's 150 hours of music

    First, thank you for the story. But I'm going to plead to audio-device story submitters now: For god's sake, when posting the story to Slashdot, please talk to your fellow geeks in geek-speak, not copy-and-pasted condescending marketing terms. I can get that from CNET or MSN or my local news anchor. 3,000 songs? 150 hours? Based on what bitrate? How big is this compared to a PC hard drive? Will this store my existing collection that takes N gigs? Obviously, we can find the real specs if we hit the company's website, but do us a favor and give us the geeky bits when submitting the story.

    FWIW, this Treo has a 10 gig drive, so I guess the 3,000 song figure is based on approx 3.3 megs per song. (Kind of low, really.) The 150 hour figure is apparently based on something between 128 and 160 kbps.

    Okay, end of rant. Cool device.

  • C|Net's on CRACK (Score:4, Funny)

    by cygnus ( 17101 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @10:28PM (#2663402) Homepage
    Both devices have a U.S. trademark and are not the only ones with that honor. Women's shoe brand Nine West also has a trademark on Treo for use "in the field of shoes and of accessories, namely handbags, belts and hosiery," according to the Patent and Trademark Office's Web site.

    There have been other Treos in the past as well. Treo, with a long vowel mark over the "e," as Handspring uses it, was trademarked at one time for use as a pesticide, although that mark is no longer active. And, in the 1960s, Treo was trademarked as the name for "soap impregnated in paper tissues for general household cleaning purposes."

    errr, thanks C|Net. that's what i go to your site to learn about. expired trademarks in the fields of pesticides and women's shoes.

  • How much time do you have? (Score:3, Informative)

    by MacGod ( 320762 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @10:37PM (#2663433)
    10GB=8.589935e+10 bits (assuming they're using 1024MB/GB not 100 to inflate the numbers). USB=12mbps=1.258291e+07bits/sec. Assuming this device completely saturates the USB port (it won't), that will take (8.59e+10)/(1.26e+07)=6826.668 seconds=1.89 hours. That seems like a long time to me. the iPod downloads its 5 gigs (yes, only 5, not 10) in ten minutes or so. Yeah, it's $150 more, but that's a big time difference

  • iPod User's Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @10:42PM (#2663458) Homepage
    Well, I'll tell you all what I think. First of all I want to mention that my brother owns an iPod and i've used it a little. I use PCs almost exclusivly (the only Mac I have runs Linux 24/7) for about 10 years.

    First I'll tell you guys the positives as I see them. The cost is a major factor. Like many people I can't drop more than maybe $50 at the drop of a hat, so the lower the price the better. The fact that for the lower price, you get 2x the storage is great also. The Treo is 2.5 cents per meg, while the iPod is 8 cents. That plus the fact that it works with Windows out of the box will probably give it very good sales. This is also good because USB is quite ubiqutous, unlike FireWire. The last good point that I'd like to touch on is the fact that it only has enough memory for 8 minutes of continuous playback. I have to say that I can't think of any way to use a MP3 player that would be so abusive that it would not be able to read a few megs off of a hard drive every few minutes. Are people planning on settings their MP3 players on those paint mixer things at hardware stores that shake paint cans like mad? Also, it's a serious bonus not to have to buy a Mac or some piece of software to be able to use my new MP3 player; of course if you already have a Mac, that's not a problem.

    Now the cons, once again as I see them. Firs the iPod is tiny and has a great UI. The jog dial works extreemly well, and with the exception that it took me a few seconds to figure out how to force it to turn off (hold pause, didn't take long ;), the controlls are perfect and obvious. I think that while USB is good, they should have included USB 2.0 for a number of reasons:

    • USB 2.0 is backwards compatible, so as more computers get USB 2, more people will get faster transfer rates. Let's face it, transfering 10 gigs at USB 1.x speeds would be mind-numbingly slow
    • FireWire is just too rare (in the wintel arena anyway) to be able to ship and expect good sales without bundeling a FireWire card with the product, IMHO
    • USB 2.0 is supposed to be faster than FireWire (or at least the current implementation of FireWire as seen on a Mac I could go out and buy today, correct?), so if USB 2 was availible you could transfer files to the Treo faster than the iPod
    The computer interface isn't the only problem that I see. First of all the Treo looks physically bigger than an iPod. I understand that it would have to be a tad bigger to hold twice as much storage, but it looks quite a bit wider, which is my complaint. The interface doesn't look nearly as good as the iPod. I don't think that the buttons could beat that slick jog dial. Now if they were to include (at least as an option) a little LCD/remote on a headphone cable like many CD players have these days, something that I think should have been offered on the iPod, that could make up for it easy. The battery life is another problem. If all your songs were encoded at 128kbps, then the Treo should only be able to play about 3.5% of it's capacity without having to recharge. While the iPod holds less, it will let you play 12% of it's capacity without having to recharge. This seems quite significant to me. The last major issue that I can say without haveing used a Treo is that it just doesn't look as cool as the iPod. If there is anything that the iMac taught us (other than how much the industry loves playing "Me too!" with ideas that become annoying fast and last TOO long), it's that sex sells. Let's face it, the average joe prefers something that looks stylish (the iMac) to something that looks like a box (average no-name PC of years ago).

    Well, those are my thoughts. I'd love to do a better in-depth comparison, so you guys feel free to send me any MP3 player (or anything else ;) that you want. My e-mail address is above! All in all I must say that for me, there is no contest that I would have to go with the iPod.

    • Re:iPod User's Opinion (Score:2, Redundant)

      by Phroggy ( 441 )
      The cost is a major factor. Like many people I can't drop more than maybe $50 at the drop of a hat, so the lower the price the better. The fact that for the lower price, you get 2x the storage is great also.


      Cost is an issue. However, the higher transfer rates, better interface, smaller size etc. definitely make the iPod more appealing.

      The Treo is 2.5 cents per meg, while the iPod is 8 cents.

      Ah, but how much data can you transfer to the device in half an hour?

      That plus the fact that it works with Windows out of the box will probably give it very good sales.

      It would be nice if the iPod had at least limited Windows support. However, since most PCs don't have FireWire anyway, the software support isn't a really high priority.

      This is also good because USB is quite ubiqutous, unlike FireWire.

      FireWire is quite ubiquitous on Macs and Sony Vaios.

      The last good point that I'd like to touch on is the fact that it only has enough memory for 8 minutes of continuous playback. I have to say that I can't think of any way to use a MP3 player that would be so abusive that it would not be able to read a few megs off of a hard drive every few minutes. Are people planning on settings their MP3 players on those paint mixer things at hardware stores that shake paint cans like mad?

      No, but if you load 20 minutes of music into RAM and spin down the hard drive, I bet you can really save on batteries.

      Also, it's a serious bonus not to have to buy a Mac or some piece of software to be able to use my new MP3 player; of course if you already have a Mac, that's not a problem.

      Exactly. And, you should buy a Mac anyway, not just because of the iPod. ;-)

      I think that while USB is good, they should have included USB 2.0 for a number of reasons:

      USB 2.0 would have been more expensive to use, probably run hotter and use more battery power (just a guess) compared to USB 1.1. Since nobody has USB 2.0 support right now (I remember hearing Windows XP doesn't have USB 2.0 support), there is no benefit to anyone right now, a possible benefit to a handful of people later, and obvious drawbacks.

      USB 2.0 is backwards compatible, so as more computers get USB 2, more people will get faster transfer rates. Let's face it, transfering 10 gigs at USB 1.x speeds would be mind-numbingly slow

      Yes, and that's exactly what the Treó does.

      FireWire is just too rare (in the wintel arena anyway) to be able to ship and expect good sales without bundeling a FireWire card with the product, IMHO

      FireWire is less rare than USB 2.0.

      USB 2.0 is supposed to be faster than FireWire (or at least the current implementation of FireWire as seen on a Mac I could go out and buy today, correct?), so if USB 2 was availible you could transfer files to the Treo faster than the iPod

      I don't recall what USB 2.0 is supposed to run at, but I think it's comparable to FireWire. That's why they're working on GigaWire or whatever it's called, which might be available before USB 2 (I really haven't been paying attention).

      blah, that's enough from me.

      • Re:iPod User's Opinion (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gleam ( 19528 )
        people keep talking about the transfer rate.

        who cares?

        You really have more than 10 gigs of music that you listen to regularly? I mean, at 74 minutes per album and 192kbit, that's 96 albums, and a mind-numbing 118 hours of music.

        I have an archos jukebox 6000, which has a 6 gig hard drive and connects via USB, and can also function as a USB hard drive. So yes, it took about 80-90 minutes to fill up the hard drive initially. But, uh, I haven't transferred any files to or from it since then.

        Why would I?

        That's about 57 albums worth of music, and I guarantee you I don't listen to more than that regularly.

        The only point at which the transfer rate really becomes an issue is if you're actually using it as a portable hard drive, and I think a relatively small number of customers use it for that purpose.

        And do you want to know *why* the people who buy these rarely use it as a hard drive? Because people who buy $200-400 hard-drive based mp3 players usually have fairly new cd burners.

        I have a 16x cd burner, which will burn an entire 700mb cd in maybe 4.5 minutes. Which doesn't require me to make space on my mp3 player, and doesn't require me to bring it to someone who has a usb or firewire enabled system, etc etc.

        Seriously.

        If you have one of these things, you know you don't use it as a portable hard drive. It's an mp3 player, first and foremost.

        of course, if you have one of these kinds of things and you find you regularly *do* do file transfers, feel free to flame away.

        -gleam
        • Couple points

          1. I have a car MP3 player. I have 12 CDs in the car, and it's not enough. It gives me the ability to pick and choose on the fly what I want to listen to. Not in the mood for acoustic death metal today? No problem.
          2. I brought 20 CDs to work today. I'll listen to half of them, and change the CDs tonight. I go through 50 CDs a week, and it'll still take me MONTHS to go through my collection. I'm serious about music.
          3. all that being said, you do have a valid point. Say it does take 3 hours. Once a week, and that's not bad. It's not an iPod, but we're PC users, and used to not getting the coolest stuff. We're okay with that, it's cheaper to get a Treo. All that being said, if someone wanted to buy me an iPod, I'll be all over it. I really have no interest in a Treo; the music management doesn't seem to be done as well as the iPod. However, for people who're considering buying a 128 mb player, this thing is far superior. And for about the same price. I wouldn't buy a Nomad (too damn big, currently), but this I could see.
          • the archos doesn't quite compare to the ipod in terms of size, but it is by no means bulky... it also costs about $200-220, only slightly more than the nomad.

            size specs on the archos:

            Dimensions: 115 x 82 x 34mm (4.5" x 3.2" x 1.3")
            Weight: 290g (12 oz.)

            size specs on the ipod:

            Height: 4.02 inches (102 mm)
            Width: 2.43 inches (61.8 mm)
            Depth: 0.78 inches (19.9 mm)
            Weight: 6.5 ounces (185 g)

            weighs half as much, which is impressive, but otherwise is very similar in terms of actual volume.

            and at twice the price for a gig less storage, and given how i use my portable mp3 players (i don't jog with them), the extra 6oz doesn't bother me.

            again, i love the way the ipod looks, it looks like a perfectly great mp3 player, but I don't think the notion regarding transfer rate is really valid for the vast majority of its users.

            but yes, i agree there are exceptions :)

            you might be interested to know that it's fairly easy to upgrade the archos jukebox.. just plop in a new 2.5" hard drive and away you go. people have upgraded theirs to 40gb, so that'd be a nice 450 albums, or so...

            -gleam

  • What? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sulli ( 195030 ) on Wednesday December 05, 2001 @10:45PM (#2663472) Journal
    No "Buy one now at ThinkGeek" link? You guys are slipping.
    • No "Buy one now at ThinkGeek" link? You guys are slipping.

      That probably has less to do with Slashdot slipping, and more to do with the fact that Thinkgeek doesn't carry them...

  • and uses a much slower USB connection instead of FireWire.

    USB 1.x can pump 1.2 megabytes per second (12 megabits, divided by 10 bits per byte counting comms overhead). That's the same as an 8x CD-ROM, or 50x realtime for a 192 kbps MP3. That's only five or six seconds per song. How is this slow for incrementally changing what's on your device when you get a new CD? Can't you spare one minute to copy the new album that you picked up at Best Buy to the device?

    USB 2.x, on the other hand, is about as fast as a FireWire brand IEEE-1394 connection.

  • 3000 songs? (Score:2, Funny)

    by dsfox ( 2694 )
    Is this the new unit of storage measurement? Will we soon see 50 megasong drives from Seagate? What if songs start getting longer again?
  • Read the blurb, that's all the comparison is. What a waste of bytes; the submitter summed up in 3 lines what it took the whole page on CNet.
  • A year ago, I designed a controller board that takes USB 1.1 as input among other things. The board uses the ScanLogic SL11R USB/RISC controller that implements most of the USB protocol in hardware.

    Sadly, the overhead of USB is quite dramatic, bulk packets are 64 bytes max size. Blasting the board with bulk transfers from an Athlon 650, I could get between 860kb and 1.0MB/s into it - depending on the data. Due to bit-stuffing every six bits (this guarantees that the receiver can synthesize the clock from the data stream), the data rate is not constant. In real life it is probably closer to 1MB/s, though.

    Interestingly, similar experiments on a Mac showed dramatically worse performance, around 600kB/s. Our resident Mac guru says this is due to very poor implemention in the OS.

    Off-topic note to engineers: The part's DMA is broken and the manufacturer doesn't seem to want to rev the die.

  • Geez people. 10 gig Treo??? 6 gig IPod???? Please people. Are you kidding me???? Get the freakin Archos 20 gig for only $330 at www.thinkgeek.com right now! Don't complain that it's only USB either. Yes USB is quite a bit slower than Firewire but please, it's not like your gonna suddenly decide to copy 10 gigs of music to your Archos all the sudden. I can't believe some people would actually sacrifice 300% more space just so the transfer speeds are faster.....IPod = dumb. 6 gigs is chunk change. And it's more expensive??!?? ha! My archos ownz the Ipod. Who cares how fast I can copy my 10 songs to my mp3 players. As long as it's not forever :)

    Jakobud

  • Cheap portable mass storage (Score:5, Informative)

    by Daniel Rutter ( 126873 ) <dan@dansdata.com> on Thursday December 06, 2001 @12:03AM (#2663694) Homepage
    If it's just the storage you're after, not the MP3 playing, I coincidentally just put up a review [dansdata.com] of a couple of external boxes that accept a 2.5 inch laptop drive (not really tiny, but not really expensive either...) which both have USB 1.1 and IEEE-1394 connectivity. One of them's pocketable, one of them's bigger and looks like a 3.5 inch drive, for no very good reason. They both let you get 20Gb of decently fast storage (as long as you use the FireWire port) for about half the price of a 5Gb iPod.

    Check it out [dansdata.com].

  • Notice the corelation? Silly design move. If they had more ram (so cheap right now too) it wouldn't have to access the HDD as often. Thus, the battery would last longer. Oh well...

  • Good Apple, bad copy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Thursday December 06, 2001 @04:32AM (#2664141)
    While I don't have the extra cash to go out and pick up an iPod I've got to play with a couple of them. They are pretty fucking cool. The screen isn't some POS ordered out of a RadioShack catalog, the battery life is long because they don't use standard batteries, and they are really compact. They're geared toward Mac users and people pissed off that they only work with iTunes don't seem to grasp that most shit is ONLY Windows compatible and most of the time Mac users are SOL when it comes to new toys. As for a new iPod-ish device coming out with more space yet less actual capability that doesn't mean much. Storage space on portables isn't such a big deal since there's no way you could listen to the thousands of songs you can carry on the battery supply you've got available. However you might want to make your portable your main MP3 storage device in which case you're actually limited by space but also connection speed. USB is not going to cut it for this sort of task. Having 10GB would be a plus but the fact it would take you forever to fill up the drive is a definite minus. Now if this thing had the same capabilities as an iPod with a groovy screen for half as much money I'd be impressed. You get what you pay for though. Ask Nomad owners who bought their deck six months ago and are STILL waiting for their MP3 collection to upload to it.
  • Don't we live in interesting times. One group of companies are hard at work making better and cheaper MP3 players which they sell with "easy to use CD ripping software" whilst another group and working equally hard to make it impossible to rip CDs. Sooner or later these two groups are going to bump into each other with one almighty BANG.

    I think that we can safely say that when they do collide they will stitch up some deal which results in the consumer being screwed over.

    BTW, does anyone know if you can buy a portable OGG player yet? Perhaps someone could come up with a firmware patch for one of these things which would add that feature.

  • Is a jukebox that has ethernet, and uses something like smb, or tftp to put stuff on/delete from it. I'd like the artist/album/song data to simply come from the filenames (ie, directory structure). Nothing else. Just a KISS mp3 player that is easy to put stuff on, remove stuff from, and organize.
    • Let me rephrase that. I want a *portable* mp3 jukebox that has those two things. I've already written my own daemon for here at home that accomplishes the task. It uses your choice of named pipe (great for web interface on the same box) or sockets (remote control...is there anybody out there who would like to help write a palm-pilot interface?)
  • While it's interesting to think about how long it takes to fill 10 gig via USB (short answer: overnight) that really isn't a big deal to me. Fine, I transfer your music one evening & I have it from then on on the Treo. There are two bigger 'time' questions though, IMO.

    1) How long does it take to start playing from the moment I boot the machine (for reference, Creative Nomad Jukebox's take up to 50 seconds for an initial boot, check out News.Creative.Com - Products.Nomad and the comments there by Nomad owners & you'll see this is a common issue)?

    2) How long does it take for the Treo to shuffle from one track to another one? In other words, are there noticable delays between non-sequential tracks as the hard drive searches for the next song? This would also come into play if I searched for a song - how long will it take to find it?

    Anyway, I can live with a long process of transfering my music to the machine as it will only have to be done once (with periodic smaller updates as I get new music), but the other issues would affect me every time I try to play music...and would just be annoying.

    Just my .02 worth.

    -Mark

  • USB2? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MrResistor ( 120588 ) <peterahoffNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday December 06, 2001 @01:38PM (#2666057) Homepage
    It doesn't say if it's USB 1 or 2. If it's USB2, then I'm excited, maybe even excited enough to buy one!

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