They’re trying to compete with the iPod — a bad idea in its own right — with a player that, while smaller, has a smaller hard drive and uses Sony’s proprietary ATRAC3 compression format. What this means is you have to use their jackass software to put songs on the thing, instead of just dragging and dropping or using damn near any software you want with the iPod.
Comments
Just a quick correction: . . Ipods start at 15 gig, Ipod minis have like 10gig I believe. This has a 20.
Also, if it were to cost less than an Ipod (which it certainly doesn’t.. $490 eh?) that would put it on competetive footing. Ipod has marketed to the elite pretty effectively.
A cheaper, smaller player with a bigger hard drive and longer battery life might be worth a slight hassle getting music onto the thing. It can’t be any slower than getting files onto a PDA 🙂
I just want a 3 gig iPod mini that runs off AAA batteries and uses USB and costs $100. I don’t need all my songs on the damn thing. Just enough for a walk, hike, pulling weeds, etc…. I don’t want to have to send the thing in for service to replace the battery. I want usb, because 1 of my machines has firewire, but 3 others don’t. I can wait a little bit to transfer some files. $100 would not be a big dent in the wallet and after I use it for a while, maybe then I’ll see that I NEED 40gigs of storage and will pay the big bucks.
13,000 songs at 48 kbps. I will take 8,000 at 128 kbps, thankyouverymuch.