Commodore eVic (now we know what it stands for)
By Simon Spagnoletti 
posted June 29th 2004 4:07AM
posted June 29th 2004 4:07AM
As certain market trends have shown us, a
nice, simple, clean design generally goes over pretty well. Unless that design is sinfully ugly. Such is the case with
the Commodore eVic MP3 player. Specs-wise it's an average current-generation unit, with a 20GB hard drive, MP3, WAV and
WMA playback, encoding up to 320kbps and voice-recording. But where's the big color screen, the twenty-some-odd hours
of battery life (it's got 8-10 hours, non-removable) and the innovative design we were promised for our next-gen MP3
players? What's the deal with the dual-color body (and really bad grammar on their website for that matter)? What's the
deal?
If I remember correctly, Commodore Computer back in the pre PC days (Apple II, Commodore PET, Sinclair Spectrum, BBC Micro has a small microcomputer effectively the size of keyboard with TV out and Cassette storage called the VIC 20. This name works everywhere except Germany where it is something rude. BTW (PET was rude in france instead.)
If you look at the site, you'll see they are branding 00's hardware with a 90's lowercase initial prepended to an 80's Commodore computer name. PET, VIC, C64. There's the naming convention.
Yep, VIC-20 is this baby's great grandfather. Thanks for reminding me how old I am.
Commodore is still quite dead. It looks like some shady outfit has managed to get their hands on the trademarks and now they're pimping out the brandname as a license to Chinese makers of crap hardware. This is horrible. My fondest and earliest geek memories were behind the keyboard of a C-64. To see the brand used like this makes me sick.
The Commodore Brand is now owned by Tulip Computers. They're the ones behind recycling 20 year old brands in the 21st century.
http://www.playerblog.com/archives/000220.shtml
Yes. Tulip Computers now owns the Commodore brand. They're a Dutch company (if memory serves correctly) which is why the English grammar isn't exactly correct.