The i-Bead 1000 MP3 player

By Ryan Block

Yesterday brought the first of what is surely to be many, many 1-inch drive DAP announcements, and today South Korean i-Bead prepared the launch of their i-Bead 1000, some pretty stiff competition to the Kinzo.  Though it's only got a 1.5 GB drive (compared to Kinzo's 2.2GB), it does play MP3/WMA/ASF/WAV/Ogg, displays BMP/JPEG images on its 128 x 128 pixel 65,000 color screen, has USB 2.0, an FM
tuner, digital voice recorder, line-in encoder, 10-hour Li-polymer battery, playlists, text viewer, and is a bit smaller (3.6 x 1.6 x 0.7 inches), phew. Which is all really nice, because it's going to need some amazing features to outshine that awful, awful name it's got.

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