Sep
28
Briefly: Olympus m:robe 100 deal, Bring iPod mini back, China’s MP3 player market way up, iPod & iTunes antitrust suit proceeds, PGI mTrix PMP
- Deal: Olympus m:robe 100 5GB MP3 Player for $100 (costs $129.99 but there’s free shipping and a $30 mail-in rebate; HDD-based, 12-hour battery life, dock cradle for charging & transferring songs included; nothing to write home about, but, hey, it doesn’t look bad and it’s a 5GB MP3 player for a hundred bucks) [via]
- Why Did Apple Kill The iPod Mini In Its Prime? (I kind of agree, why not keep it with a few easy improvements; color screens and 8GB hard drives wouldn’t be difficult to incorporate) [via]
- China’s MP3 player market up 107.7% from last year (with respective sales up 76.32%; top brands were: Aigo, Samsung, Zarva, DEC and BenQ; of interest is also the fact that “the price competition was concentrated on large-capacity products and color-screen products”) [via]
- Antitrust Suit Against Apple Over iPod, iTunes to Proceed (plaintiff Slattery claims “Apple forces people who own iPods to buy music online only from iTunes and also forces iTunes customers to buy iPods to play the music they purchase”; “Apple moved to dismiss all the claims, but U.S. District Judge James Ware rejected the bulk of the motion”; “the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks certification as a class action”) [via]
- PQI mTrix Smallest PMP Around (not bad…—2-inch TFT LCD; weighs 115g; comes with a miserable 32MB NAND flash memory but there are MMC/SD expansion slots; video support: MPEG, DiVX (and JPEG for your pictures); audio support: MP3/WMA/WAV; costs about $150, to be released in Korea in early October)
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