Advertisement
Engadget
Why you can trust us

Engadget has been testing and reviewing consumer tech since 2004. Our stories may include affiliate links; if you buy something through a link, we may earn a commission. Read more about how we evaluate products.

The very first MP3 player?

Saehan Eiger Labs MPMan

Think you know what the first MP3 player was? Even we had bought into the urban legend that it was Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300, but Eliot Van Buskirk does a little debunking over at CNET, pointing out that the very first one to come out was actually Saehan's MPMan, a 32MB (yeah, megabyte) player which was sold in the US as the Eiger Labs MPMan F10/F20 a few months before the first Rio arrived. So why weren't they sued by the RIAA just like Diamond was? Because South Korea-based Saehan wasn't as easy to take to court as Diamond, which was headquartered in California. Not that not being sued seemed to make much of a difference for Saehan—the company has all but disappeared in the six and a half years since they first introduced the MPMan.