The Rio Carbon C: what could have been

So after the announcement of Rio's demise yesterday we were finally able to come out with the insider details we weren't legally able to show you before. For a couple weeks now we've been sitting on a 90-page user manual sent to us from a reliable unnamed high-level Rio employee on the no-longer-forthcoming Rio Carbon C, what was to be their 2005 flagship device. But man, talk about rubbing salt into open wounds—the Carbon C was set to outclass pretty much everything out there.

So what was it going to sport? Well, to start it was going to have 20 and 30GB drive models, a high res screen, theme support, scroll wheel, dock, remote (sigh), USB charging, mass-storage compliancy, line-in/FM recording, PlaysForSure, picture viewer, and, of course Audible and MP3 support. (FLAC and OGG support were not mentioned in the manual.)

It might also frustrate you to learn that they had plans to bring the regular old Carbon up to 8GB, and that the Carbon C was so close we could almost taste it. Like, they were seriously entering production about to ship these things for the holidays—it was freaking done. Ah well, c'est la vie.

[Thanks, Liz]

Guess even the peeps at Rio thought that Duran Duran joke was funny.