HP Officially Announces 40g MP3 Stereo Component 294
jspectre writes "HP announced their new
de100c "digital entertainment center." Containing a 40g drive and a built in CDRW drive it will store "up to 750 CDs of music" or 9000 tracks. You can make your own playlists and burn them out to CDR/CDRW's. All of this for $999.99. No mention of any digital management controls on the device." I totally need a review model! I saw this thing at the last LinuxWorld and it looked good, but only really playing with it for a few weeks will let me know if it's better then the audiotron that I've been using in my home system.
When will it be $300 bucks? (Score:5, Insightful)
why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm. (Score:0, Insightful)
Storage in the wrong place (Score:3, Insightful)
So why put any storage in it at all? Why not just shove a network socket on the back, or make it 802.11x aware, and play MP3s off a server on your network?
That would be sweet.
Expensive (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:that's strange... (Score:2, Insightful)
Furthermore, even if the companies wanted to not step on each other's toes, the law requires that they continue to behave as competitors until the final merger goes through.
Re:Waste of money (Score:2, Insightful)
> functionality
We might be able to build one, but not everybody can. And not everybody wants a PC in their living room. The price is high, but as we know, it will come down. Hope HP makes it...they've been doing some cool stuff recently.
$999?!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
How do they justify a grand?
not completely protection-free (Score:5, Insightful)
Its all about marketing (Score:2, Insightful)
They started the price extremely high for a purpose, the price will come down, but not before a bunch of the technology deficient purchase them.
Re:Waste of money (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the usual
Re:why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Uncle Joe might buy one (Score:3, Insightful)
"Slashdot posters" aren't a big enough market to pursue. "High-end stereo buyers", on the other hand, are.
Re:why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Combine that with artifacts introduced and frequences subtraced by lossy MP3 compression, you've a recipe for poor quality sound (caveat: I've not listened to one yet.)
For a kilobuck, you can have a nice quality CD juke that'll give you much better sound quality.
And, it is a PC. Read the specs [ratedpc.com]. I'd pry one open before buying to see if the audio output section/soundcard is built into the system board. In PCs where that's the case, I've found there to be *loads* of mobo-generated noise.
Re:Waste of money (Score:2, Insightful)
What I really want (Score:4, Insightful)
What I really want is something that is a larger equivalent of my Archos device. I want it to appear on the network as a PC with a large shared hard drive.
I would want a minimum of 100Gb of storage.
Alternatively a completely diskless pod with about 16Mb ram, an 802.11b network access point, sound output and some sorta TV interface would serve the same purpose. It could pull the toones off my PC server. With a larger buffer (128Mb or more) it could do video as well.