zap - I agree. With the 5 gigs I have, I can play music videos and movies, while in the car or somewhere else when it's going slow. Not to mention the gaming capability. I have a sega emulator (haven't did much digging for the other platforms since I don't get into gaming as much as puzzle games like freecell, logic, memory, etc) that plays the 180 sega games plus I found at ROM sites. Oh and I can use my PPC as a phone with my Sierra Wireless CDMA aircard and use it as a 1xrtt data modem, when we finally go CDMA (soon...please, soon!!), here locally. So when I'm sitting in traffic, I can surf the web, get emails...Oh...and check FARK! LOL...they need to make a better version of PPC Fark. If it's anything like the custom channel I created, there's way to much to dig through...

you are all going to wish that you could have Safari.

Oh...in withMP3, you can program the IPAQ buttons for different functions for example....

<> <> <> <>
Playlistup playlistdown play/pause I-task
DIRECTIONAL
Left-Previous song
Right-Next song
Up - Volume #2 (1 being car radio) UP
Down - Volume #2 DOWN

Wanted to originally mention this, to indicate that you CAN drive with this and still change songs, adjust volume, etc...without looking at the unit.

Huh. Well... it might be useful if your arms fell off or something.

the archos jukebox is only marginally larger than a pack of cigarettes, it easily fits in my pocket (as long as i'm not wearing jeans, admittedly). The screen on the jukebox 6000 may be a bit on the small side (not too small for those of us used to peering at cellphone screens), but, as you seem to have willfully ignored, it has an RCA video output jack, so the video can be displayed on a television. You know..RCA video output..like on a DVD player, where you have the red-white-yellow triad of cables. Know what i'm talking about? It has a jack for the yellow (and, of course, you can use an 1/8" to dual-RCA cable to output the audio)

furthermore, i've never even used musicmatch jukebox. When I want to add songs to my archos, i drag and drop them. When i want to reorganize my tunes, i build a new playlist in Winamp, and add it to the "!Lists" folder (which always appears at the top, of course).

of course, now, i have a collection of music videos, guerrillanews videos, a couple of full length movies, and install files for all the "essential" peices of software that always seem to come in handy. Being able to just plug the thing into any of my friend's PCs and swap files with them as if my jukebox were just another drive on their PC is pretty swank.

Let's also not forget the difference in price. You're really just paying for designer styling and contribution to the cult of jobs. I'm all for techno-fetishism, but I at least try to keep it grounded in a fair dose of pragmatism.

Most of the pro-ipod anti-archos arguments ive read so far seem to revolve around a fundamental failure to understand the full potential of these devices. Of course, this is a common pitfall in defending (and being absorbed by) a paradigm that sacrifices power, flexability, and cost-efficiency for the sake of style and freedom from all that "technical" stuff. heh.

I dunno how people can hate the iPod... Well, except for those who are biased against Apple.

fark it, get a terrapin instead. Way better, and it doubles as a storage unit and plays .wav files too.

While the Archos Jukebox series might be a little heavier and larger than the iPod, that thing sure is durable. I've dropped the Archos MMJB20 twice on sidewalks and it's still going strong.

Macker: The iPod can also be used as a storage device; some people have actually put an OS on it, so they could use it has an emergency boot disk.

DIEOptix: I've dropped my iPod plenty of times, and it didn't even skip.

Me wants iPod

I must say im a huge BSD/linux fan, so of course I like OSX and the ipod. Terrapin is still better, and larger as well.

Ohnoitschris
I'm biased against Apple and even I admit the iPod is pretty sweet.

There are two points I want to make, but I'm going to approach these from the point of view of me hating you all since I'm up at 6:30am on a Saturday on very little sleep.

A.> To whoever said Apple didn't bring USB into the mainstream: Your argument is flawed and your shoes smell like cabbage. Microsoft had done a -terrible- job supporting USB to that point. Apple eliminated everything but USB from the iMac when it came out and left it up to third parties to fill the niche. A guy I know who worked for Apple had a budget to go around and buy up new USB-based peripherals so he and his dev team could write new drivers for the products. That's why, to this day, Apple's USB support is tops. You plug in near any camera, it's recognized. You plug in near any printer, it's recognized -and- ready to go. They made USB the simple peripheral interface that it was hoped to be and Microsoft hadn't yet been able to accomplish.

4) The Odyssey 1000 is in a 'i'll believe it when i see it' category. This product was announced back in July and hasn't yet shipped. Some of the pictures were just well-photoshopped iPods-- some people on another forum pointed out specific detail in a hi-res photo on their site a while back.
Older PR
Even if they do get it to market, there are things so inherently wrong in the design and feature set... scroll wheel, non-iPod OS, speech recognition? etc.

screw it, i'm going back to bed.

isnt it amazing that the odyssey and ipod look so familier(button placement) to the original rio 300?? ah the rio 300, my parents got me it on christmas. they walked in to ciruit city and asked if you sell the rio 300 mp3 player. the guy looked at them as if they were crazy. lol. they finally found it in software etc.. i think it was 250 buck. that was back in 98

I remember when i was a kid, this other kid had a macintosh and he kept telling me his computer was better then mine, and i kept thinking, what a farking dick.

The thing I never really liked about Apple is their users. Most of them that I have experienced have that elitist "I'm better than you, I have a mac," attitude. That, and the fact that there arent many good games out for them. I got a 10gb iPod for christmas this year, and it completely blew me out of the water. It would be a lot better without Musicmatch (will I will replace), but I can still put about 2500-3000 songs on it in about 20-25 minutes. Not only that, it charges while you are uploading the songs, which helps out a lot since the batter is 80% charged in an hour, and fully charged in 3 hours.

The iPod has changed the way I thought about Apple products a lot; so much, in fact, that I recently bought a (used) Powermac G3 at a really good price for what I got. Plus the guy gave me a ton of burned software.

But back to the iPod, during christmas, I flew out from Boston to Hawai'i to visit my brother, and my iPod lasted both flights, with some use in between flights. The screen is high resolution, the colours contrast well (black and white reads well), and the layout of everything is perfect.

There's a whole lot more I could rave on about the iPod, but I will leave you at this: the iPod is a great product.

I have an Emac. Got it when I switched jobs so I wouldn't have to help windows users with their machines. But I don't worship it.

Vishus: to increase your FM broadcasting, buy a five watt pirate radio transmitter and put it in your car.

The reason people want to lug around 20gb of music is because 1) music is your identity, so the more tunes you have the more personality you have, and 2) music is a social act--how cool would it be to be able to give people movies you like as well as music?
3) everybody is turning into a nomad, traveling constantly, so all of these gadgets are like little portable environments because nobody is at home any more.

That will be a nickel.

Get it while you can (but why would you, since the iPod is cheaper), because Apple is going to sue like crazy to get them to stop shipment of this obvious rip off. Remember the iMac ripoffs? Apple very successfully stop those companies from shipping their clones of the iMac design.

Personally, I think the iPod looks a lot better than that Rio 300.

I have an eDigital MPX-100 CF Card based MP3 player and while I like it very much, it has some serious drawbacks that better not be present in the Odyssey 1000. For one, I thought the voice activation would be cool because I thought I would be able to stop and start the player using voice commands while I snowboard. Try pressing little buttons through your coat with gloves on. However, Start and Stop are not available commands. Duh. Also, the playlist feature is really lame. If you want one song in two playlists, you have to copy the song up twice. Also, the format of the CF card is proprietary so you can't slip the CF card into an adapter and copy the MP3s to the card then put it back in the player with would be much faster that using the USB interface. Lastly, the construction is suspect. While it has help up well, it has a gaping hole where the CF card (or Micro Disk) goes in and a floppy rubber cover that better not break. In the end though, it was only $150US (without memory), has held up very well and sounds great. If eDigital addresses these issues with the Odyssey 1000, I would consider it when I go for an upgrade. Hard drives still concern me when it comes to impact. Anyone out there have a hard drive based MP3 player that died due to impact?

man... HD players are crap. they are expensive as all hell... and having your entire collection (well most of it.. i know my collection wont fit 20 gigs) in one easy to lose easy to damage device is stupid.

The best MP3 player is a CD based one. Everyone has a cd burner these days.. and its good to have your entire collection on CDs incase your computer HD dies. sure I wont have my entire collection at my finger tips, but I have no problem with killing a few hours on one cd. Going on a trip? just choose 6 cds. And if you lose the disc or the cd player.. youve only lost a small chunk of your collection. CD MP3 players are cheaper, use a cheap medium, and dont need special hookups to load more MP3's onto it. They also play regular CDs.

And hopefully if iriver hurry their ass up, we will have OGG support and then it will truly rock every other mp3 player out there.

Btw if you want portable video.. get Pocket PC. From what ive seen, the new portable media players generaly use a small low res screen like that of pocket TVs, and WMV for video. A far cry from a brilliant TFT 3.75 inch 320x240 (landscape) display of a pocket pc useing Divx video and Ogg/Mp3 audio. Oh and the pocket PC can also play WMA,MP3,and OGG vorbis too.

For anyone who uses an electric razor: The new Norelco Spectra razor kicks ass. Wife got it for me for Christmas and I'm still shaving off the first charge. My face is "smooth as a babies ass"

um ya. keep on believing this thing is "the ipod killer".

haha. um. ya.a

Ive still got my rio 300 that i use nearly every day its probally the best present ive ever got and my pc is to old to bother upgrading so its rio 300 for me

Mp3? Pfft, for the birds. I love my baby just fine. I carry about 50 hours worth of music with me, and it will happily play all 50 hours worth on a single AA.

this article should have an "unlikely" tag.

Archos Jukebox Recorder 20 still rocks my world. USB 2.0, 20gb, looks like a HD to your PC, and super-easy to use. Even has digital audio connections. http://www.archos.com/

Albert, does that Norelco shave support the new Firewire standard?

I always thought the coolest thing about the ipod was the firewire HD. I don't really have any use for an mp3 player.

How exactly is this cheap ripoff which costs more going to "kick ipod's butt"?

I picked up a 10G iPod a couple months ago. One thing that's really easy for people to underestimate is just how damn durable this thing is. It is a goddamn brick. No thin plastic, just solid-ass stainless steel and thick lucite. I've carried mine around constantly since November and there's nothing more than surface scratches that'd probably polish out to nothing in ten or fifteen minutes. It's probably the best engineered thing I own.

Though my Powerbook 867 comes in second.

When will one of these things finally become advanced enough to support the superior 8-Track format?

Can't answer me, can you?

I didn't think so.

I have an iPod.

Best investment I've ever made. I love to take it jogging with me and just set it to radomly play through my available music.

It doesn't skip, and the battery life is incredible.

Voice control is SOOOO overrated. It takes way too long to try and tell a device what to do instead of just hitting a button to tell it to do it. Its the whole gui vs cli. A gui sure looks nice, but for fast navigation through directories a cli almost always wins out. Its just faster to hit keys instead of moving a mouse to a location then clicking.

Voice Recognition. I'll bet you have to give speech commands to navigate the menus. That sucks. What would be really nice on a portable MP3 player is voice recognition that allowed you to hum a song for a few bars and then it would play it. Yeah baby!

And for all this childish Firewire vs USB 2 crap, sheesh. I can't believe any of you Firewire fans out there think anyone believes that USB is as good. Everyone knows that USB 2 might not keep up bit for bit in the speed department, but it's cheaper, and it's everywhere (realatively speaking, of course).

When it comes to speed, USB 2 is good enough. I've got two 120 Gigabyte 7200 rpm hard drives hooked up to my computer. They work great. I've never notices any speed difference between them and my internally connected drive.

I see post complaining about how much longer it would take to fill up 20 gigabytes with USB 2 vs. Firewire and I just have to shake my head. Come on guys, it doesn't take that much longer. When you consider that it's cheaper and more likely to be on the computer you are looking it -- how can you blast someone for wanting it?

True enough, the power and quasi-networkability of Firewire is very cool. They both have their uses, why biatch about which one is better?

Several things to comment on, from an old geek who works on the iPod:

Mikey-San:

Some FYIs:

USB 2.0 does not kick FireWire's ass in real-world testing. If you know what you're looking at, it doesn't even do it on paper. Why? USB 2.0 is not isochronous, where FireWire (both 1394 and 1394b) is.

Quite true. The problem is that USB relies on your CPU -- FireWire doesn't. So, if your CPU is loaded down running other things, USB bogs. USB 2.0 is _slightly_ faster than FireWire on paper, but dies in the real world -- and the new FW blows it into the weeds.

Xtremehkr:

you are all going to wish that you could have Safari.

Damn straight. I've been using it, and it's scary fast. Literally triple the speed of IE, and no bloat.

Tech:

The iPod can also be used as a storage device; some people have actually put an OS on it, so they could use it has an emergency boot disk.

It's a FireWire hard drive. It's fast enough (unlike USB) to run apps from, even run your OS from. We have sales reps who carry their whole desktop environment on an iPod; wherever they go, plug it in and your entire world is there. Plus, you just carry it in your pocket -- no checked baggage, no laptop to carry.

Pitmaster:

Me wants iPod

Talk to me if you're serious. I can get discounts on them.

Evil_carrot:

The Odyssey 1000 is in a 'i'll believe it when i see it' category. This product was announced back in July and hasn't yet shipped. Some of the pictures were just well-photoshopped iPods-- some people on another forum pointed out specific detail in a hi-res photo on their site a while back.

Exactly. We've known about it for over six months, and it's been "shipping any day now" since then. And their pictures were literally shots stolen from iPod fan sites, and badly Photoshopped.

When they deliver anything, IF they do, we'll have one in the competitive benchmark lab. Yes, we check the competition.

Riomp300:

isnt it amazing that the odyssey and ipod look so familier(button placement) to the original rio 300??

Hmm... I hadn't seen that one before. The iPod's "wheel" isn't just a metal bezel, though -- it's a touch wheel that scrolls through menus, changes volume, moves settings, and the buttons are actually the four quadrants around that.

Elitotaco:

Not only that, it charges while you are uploading the songs, which helps out a lot since the batter is 80% charged in an hour, and fully charged in 3 hours.

Part of the beauty of FireWire, and the problem of USB. Charging while connected just makes life easier. And that battery charging rate drops off like that on purpose, to make the battery last longer (trickle charging the last bit does wonders for battery life).


Finally, there are (of course) changes coming to the iPod, and I know about them; it's my job. Some of you are right about your speculations, some wrong, and some just spiteful. But I can't tell you, or I'd have to kill you.

Ciao.

The iPod is too big. You can't use it as a cell phone or a PDA, either. Also, it can't do noise cancellation.

All my stuff is in ogg. This helps me not.

-------------------------------BOTTOM LINE

If you have an iPod - you understand.

If you don't have an iPod - get one, use it for a week, and then comment on it (borrow a friend's if you have to).

Then go to a Circuit City, and start looking at the DOZENS of MP3 players. RAM-based...Hard Drive-based...USB...blue...siliver...shiny...full of stupid features and ridiculous modular add-ons...and ask yoursekf - "Are any of these better?" Your answer of course will be "No." and that's true for this new piece of junk.

Now I will admit that a player intended solely for the Windows marketplace might work better with some of the software, but I believe that anyone following the steps I've suggested would feel anything other than love and respect for this elegant product.

Glewtion:

and start looking at the DOZENS of MP3 players. RAM-based...Hard Drive-based...USB...blue...siliver...shiny...full of stupid features and ridiculous modular add-ons...and ask yoursekf - "Are any of these better?" Your answer of course will be "No." and that's true for this new piece of junk.

I don't know if everyone will come to the same conclusion you did. I do know that, despite coming sort of late to the party, only selling for 14 months, and not having a Windows version until September, the iPod has sold over 600K units. Most of the stores that carry them ran out of stock over Christmas because demand was high (higher than expected). I don't think anyone else, Archos included, can say that.

So, I'll believe "iPod Killer" when it comes out and beats us in the marketplace... because that's where it's decided.

I know this is an amazing concept, but for different people, different needs. iPods cost a lot because they use more expensive and good components, from the Toshiba HD that's smaller than a 2.5 to Firewire to the 10hour rechargable lithium battery to a metal and high quality plastic case, and a nice LCD screen. Nobody else has done that, yet, as has been said. Heaven forbid someone who just wants an mp3 player/portable HD pay more for a higher quality product in all respects except for features they don't care about (voice activation, digital in/out, video playback). People need to relax and stop wanting their mp3 player to kick another mp3 player's butt in the market to stroke their egos, and just buy what suits them best.

Ok, you want a real Ipod killer: Try the newly announced SonicBlue Pearl.

About as small as an Ipod, maybe smaller, 20G and 40G models, possibly a lower price, OGG Support, and it is going to have some of the best software around. It is still a little while away, but it will seriously give iPod a run for it's money.

I think that voice recognition is pretty sweet if you've got your mp3 player plugged up to your car stereo. I hate navigating through my playlists when i'm driving around.

just one reason it makes sense. although it also sucks.

sucky suck sucks.

actually you can use the ipod as a pda i think it even comes now with calenders and such built in

i dont see why mac users are always seen as raving arseoles by a lot of people. I'm guessing the people you ran into were spoiled rich kids who would be like that no matter what. but i like my mac and right now i feel like every pc user acts like an elitest arsehole to me saying things like your system has no games, isnt that company dead yet?, haha you don't have kazaa. besides if you want to play games by a console system of all things i have an x box

Anything with an "i" in front of its name makes me want to urinate on it.

I was planning on buying an Ipod right now, until I read this. Does anyone think that apple will lower the prices on Ipod if I wait until this Odyssey thing comes out? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

Mattevil:

actually you can use the ipod as a pda i think it even comes now with calenders and such built in

Not quite a PDA -- you can load contacts (vCards) and calendars (iCalendar files) onto your iPod and display them, but you need to edit them elsewhere and just download them. Use iSync, and the updating is automatic every time you plug it in.

I KNOW those features are in iPod 1.2 and later -- I was the QA engineer for them. Trust Me (tm). And say "Hi" to your brother Scott.

The_god_ninti:

As for Sonic Blue Pearl -- yes, it looks interesting, but it isn't out yet. The iPod hasn't stopped development yet, either -- so comparing shipping iPods to "soon to be released" competition isn't entirely accurate. Just FYI.

Mods, can you please delete the post that is screwing up the formatting on this thread? (Glewtion's?)

Pedantic:

Of course, the iPod is king right now, and will undoubtedly get better. I was just pointing out another possible contender.

I have to hand it to Apple this time. Apple has been real ahead of the game here for a long time now with the iPod. I really dislike Apple, but I have to give them their props in this case. But I can't wait for the day they get some competition in the 1.8 inch HD based MP3 player market.

I think the iPod has done more for Apple than anything else in recent history. Having been a Mac user for a while now I realise that most people don't know much about Apple products. They are certainly turned off by you telling them that maybe there is a better computer out there than the one they are using.

The iPod is your classic Apple product however, looks good, well thought out, takes advantage of slightly more expensive technologies, and is very easy to use. The latest products to be released always has a slight advantage to products already on the market. What would be the point of releasing something not as good as the iPod, there are plenty of those already. I was hoping that it wouldn't be such a clone though. The more intense the competition the better iPod2 will be.

For those who would write this off as a one lucky product you should try using Safari, the new web browser. Even in Beta it makes IE look retarded. Beyond that there is OSX, iTunes, iPhoti, Photoshop. The only challenge left for Apple to overcome is to get people beyond the negative elitest stereotype that still manages to exist. When I switched it wasn't because I woke up one morning and decided that from that day on I was better than everyone else. I just got tired of buggy computers that are obsolete in a heartbeat and take longer to syncronize than use.

Try an Apple won't you?

Archos mp3 players/recorders rock. I bought 3 of them for the kids the Christmas before last. Its like a portable hard drive/multimedia center.

Ah, your all dumb, MiniDisc is the ONLY way to go... Jeez...