“In the world of portable music players, the spotlight has lately been on Apple Computer Inc.’s top-selling iPod, but Rio Audio, the MP3 player pioneer, isn’t idling in the shadows. Rio, now owned by Digital Networks North America, Inc., debuted a player Monday that is expected to be the first of many to squarely compete against the popular 4-gigabyte iPod Mini,” May Wong reports for The Associated Press.
“The Rio Carbon, shaped like a slim wedge and weighing 3.2 ounces, uses Seagate Technology’s new 1-inch, 5-gigabyte hard drive, and touts up to 20 hours of playback time on a rechargeable battery. It will cost $249 and be available in late August, said Dan Torres, Rio’s vice president of product marketing,” Wong reports. “GoVideo, a DVD and VCR maker based in Scottsdale, Ariz., will enter the audio player market in September with a similar 5-gigabyte portable player as well as a 2.5-gigabyte model under a revived Rave-MP brand name.”
“Both the Rio and Rave-MP players will play songs encoded in the Windows Media Audio or MP3 formats. They will thus be locked out from songs purchased from online music providers that feature incompatible formats, such as Apple’s market-leading iTunes Music Store, of which songs are transferable only to Apple iPods,” Wong reports. Full article here.
See the Rio Carbon 5GB audio player here.
For $249, I’d rather buy the Rolls Roys of the MP3 players than this pale imitation… Pathetic…
Yeeeeaaaaaahhhhh!!!
mini killer?
lol
I think I’m going to develop a wall-hack for this iPod Shooter game here…
The design looks ok – but the ipod is in a totally different league!
Back to the drawing board RIO!!…
Nope, ain’t gonna do it. The iPod Mini is just a thousand times cooler than that. And for the same price, you get the “ooooh you have an iPod mini!” from everyone rather than “whats that, some kind of PDA?”.
Is there a reason Rio and all the other device makers do not include AAC playback in their products? Surelly whatever that would cost them is not going go affect the price of the final product; after all, they pay to include WMA support. Apple may have closed the door for the protected AAC files it sells online, but with iTunes anyone can rip their Audio CDs to AAC on either OS X or Windows platforms. If Rio wants to compete with Apple they should start with AAC playback.
how can I say about the design of this player,it even can not be mentioned to compete with ipod mini, shame on Rio. this player just sucks!!
Alternative write up from The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/02/rio_carbon/
The design makes me think it’ll be popular with PC techie types (read male Windows and Linux geeks) but outside of this rather small field, the mini’s not going to face many issues I don’t think.
what is that lop-sided thing? I still rule!
lol i just bought a 40g ipod so no chnace of me moving from aac format, i bet that all the ipod awners think the same way so…. good luck rio
+theres mp3 player looks like a squah dump, im sure they could of get better designers lol
OMG. The Rio site is a total rip off of the Macromedia site. Who do they think they are fooling?
Navigating thousands of songs with that interface looks like it would be pretty tough.
Looks like the “marketing” is following in Sony’s steps. Lots of songs (if you record at 64kbps). It “is perfect for the music lover with a few hundred CDs…” Yeah, right. Fit a few hundred CDs on there at a reasonable kbps level. Not going to happen. Looks to me like the other players in the field are trying to market increased capacity while downplaying the lower quality…must be a Windoze thing.
The amount of songs it can hold seems suspect unless they’re at a very low bitrate. I suspect that Apple will use the just announced 6GB Hitachi drive as soon as it is possible…. albeit they can’t seem to get enough of the current 4 GB drives OR are they just kind of stalling to announce that the mini will have the upgraded 6 GB drive real soon and at the same price???? That would one-up Rio!
Rio’s player will probably steal a half- to a whole point of Apple’s market share in September and maybe October just because of the drive size. If Apple upgrades to the 6gb drive before Christmas Rio’s gains will be nullified and then some.
Uhhh, tell me it’s April Fools Day?!?
it makes me wonder though… how can all these other companies make players that go for ~20hours when the ipod mini goes for only 8? My only gripe about my two mini’s is the battery life.
I almost feel sorry for Rio. Not quite though.
Jeff:
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I was just going to write the same thing. What’s up with the battery life. Can’t be a size issue! Apple needs to update the battery as this is the only thing that keeps it from being perfect.
Love my mini though!
That is one ugly POS…
Keep trying rio.
It’s ugly. Period. But I guess beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I guess Rio needs to get their eyes fixed. Or something.
amen.. this is perfect for windows geeks.. very 1998..
actually.. it rips off the ipod in many areas.. so it’s on its way..but.. no scroll wheel?.. where’s the scroll mechanism, minding apple’s patents..
how do you maneuver through menus..
this thing.. does.. have.. menus, right?
one thing Rio has:
You can wait 2 months for an iPod mini, or you can buy this thing now. If you don’t know the difference between the two players…well…could be a tough decision for some.
I read somewhere that battery life is somewhat tied into bit rate. Lower the bit rate the longer the battery life. So it could be a charade life number of songs.