Samsung Set To Introduce Android-Based iPod Touch Competitor 221
blixtech writes "Virtually unchallenged in the portable media player market, Apple's iPod Touch is set to receive a pretty strong competitor at CES 2011. Samsung has just announced they will showcase an Android-powered PMP called the Galaxy Player, featuring almost the same hardware as the Galaxy S smartphone."
Re:About Time (Score:4, Insightful)
The scroll wheel was nice. Being able to locate the music you wanted to listen to quickly definitely made for a better experience. Touch screens have since made that much less important.
Always the best (Score:2, Insightful)
It was never the best player
Actually it was; just not by metrics you choose to deem important.
Re:About Time (Score:5, Insightful)
They made it 'idiot proof' (translation: 'Easy to use') and they coupled it with a library of music that is also 'easy to use'. The 'best features' of the other MP3 players were trying to compensate for their lack of a good/popular legit source of music.
The reason you don't understand is that you're neglecting iTunes.
Re:About Time (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy. Timing and It Just Works(tm).
First is because the whole "portable digital music" thing was in its infancy and just awaiting its exponential growth. Apple got there are the right time.
Second because they had a player that had the right formfactor, ample storage, and a usable UI. The iPod was the size of a deck of cards with 5GB of storage. Players that size had a whopping 128MB of storage! Expandable with 64MB expansion cards that cost an arm and a leg. And the scroll wheel was one of those "why didn't I think of that?" ways of navigating huge quantities of music. The competitor in storage would be the Creative Nomad, which had the bulk of a really old portable CD player, with a pile of heft. Creative included two sets of batteries because the battery life was fairly atrocious - a couple of hours-ish per set.
Then you had Firewire. Filling 6GB of Nomad storage at USB 1.1 speeds took forever. Filling 5GB of space at Firewire speed took an hour or less.
Finally, you have iTunes. In one app you can do your ripping, library management, and syncing.
And Apple had it in such a combination that when the whole digital music revolution took off around 2003-2004, Apple was right there with product in the store. (The iPod, which was the best selling MP3 player since it came out, only sold its 1 millionth unit 3 years later).
Next, Apple came out with the iTunes music store. Suddenly, a way to legally acquire music easily. Now Joe Q. Public had a stupid-simple way to rip their existing CD collection, to buy music, to manage their music, and to copy their music to their portable player.
And yes, it also helped that all the user had to do was plug the thing in and it would automatically sync and update and everything. Suddenly even tech newbies (e.g., your parents) could manage their iPods themselves and their music collections. And the marketing campaign helped spread the idea that MP3s weren't just a geek thing. Which meant the 99.9% of the non-geek population could suddenly have entire music libraries in their pocket.
And when the non-geek population started getting into this, music stores and DRM-free were the result because they cared. Otherwise who would bother serving the 0.1% geek market?
Re:Virtually unchallenged? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Always the best (Score:3, Insightful)
hammering your amp's low power input to save "wear" on the part thats been designed to actually do work
Brilliant