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Adios, Rio
The MP3 market is a crowded place. Sure, Apple has a commanding share of the market (and I never tire of writing that), but there is a lot of competition out there.Today, there is a little less competition for Apple. The company that makes (well, made) the Rio series of MP3 players is bowing out of the digital music biz. The Rio MP3 players were fairly popular, though obviously not popular enough.Free not all you Rio enthusiasts out there, the brand and name haven't been sold, so the Rio may rise again.Please pause your iPods in a moment of silence for its fallen foe.
How-To: Make a Nokia Pop port to female mini jack
When Nokia announced their music player capable phones they neglected to mention the lack of support for external headphones. Since the release of the 6230 and its related family with mp3/aac playback support, many disgruntled users have made their own home-brew cables to plug in headphones. Today we will show one such mod for the Nokia HDS-3 cable. This cable ships with the 6230 and other Nokia phones capable of stereo playback.
YesAsia's J III Swarovski Edition Jay Chou player
You don't feel too bad if you haven't heard of Jay Chou (unless you're a big T-pop fan, that is), who's apparently the bee's knees in Taiwan these days. Apparently so big he got to sign some silly endorsement contract (like so many before him) with YesAsia to produce the J III, a Swarovski crystal encrusted flash player limited to 2000 pieces for about $270 US. Dude, he totally sold out; we're like, never watching a Jay Chou movie again. But it's the Jay wallpaper, demo tracks, voice message, and pre-loaded soundtrack music from his newest film that's sure a huge seller with super nerdy 12 year old girl anime fans the States over. [Via The Gadget Blog]
Mp3 market experiences 200% sales increase
The Mp3 market has experience an almost 200% increase in sales over 2003, according to research firm In-Stat. 27.8 million MP3 players were sold in 2004, and In-Stat projects that 104 million units will be selling annually by 2009. That's a lot of Mp3 players, and Apple leads the market with the iPod holding on to a 30.2% share of the worldwide market. I can remember when the iPod was first launched, my reaction was something like, "It's an Mp3 player. Big deal." That shows what I know. Staying on top takes effort, and I'm itching for new Apple hardware, which leads me to the question: What do I want in the next generation of the iPod? Well, a "podcast" menu item would be nice, and seems to make sense considering the podcast feature that will be a part of the next release of iTunes. Greater storage capacity is always a good idea, and a color screen across the board would be nice as well. Of course, I still want to see the option to jump directly to an album from shuffle mode that I've discussed before. What would you like to see?
