07-18-2002, 07:00 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Toshiba launches iPod competitor
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0206/18.toshiba.php
What a deviant world we live in! Thoughts reporting on a new Palm, and now MacWorld reporting on an iPod competitor. It's sick people, really sick! At any rate, this Toshiba audio player looks quite interesting - as the photo below shows, they're using a removable PCMCIA hard drive, making this unit easy to upgrade. The question is, with the iPod now shipping in 20 gig models, how much space do you need? Still, after my rant yesterday about companies making big and ugly players for the PC, it's really nice to see Toshiba coming out with something that actually competes with the iPod. Way to go Toshiba!
"Toshiba Corp. has chosen a removable hard drive for their new portable music player, which means a physically larger player but one with a much greater capacity for your favorite music. The Gigabeat will playback music stored in the MP3, WMA or WAV digital audio file formats and Toshiba says the bundled 5GB hard disk offers enough space for around 1,000 MP3 files of 5 minutes length recorded at 128Kbps (bits per second). That's 20 or 40 times the capacity of current memory cards.
The hard disk drives are 1.8-inch models developed by Toshiba. They are encased in PC Cards and so can also be used with most notebook PCs or other devices with PC Card slots. Of course, using Apple's iPod, simply connecting the player to your Mac via the FireWire cable mounts the drive on your desktop. With all this data storage space, transferring files to the player could take some time and here Toshiba has implemented the new USB2.0 interface, which can transfer data at 480M bps -- a much higher speed than the 12M bps supported by USB1.1, which is found on most digital music players today. Using the bundled application software, Toshiba says an entire CD worth of audio can be transferred to the device in 30 seconds." Source: Dave Furey
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