News Toshiba debuts smallest HDD MP3 player

From el Reg:

Toshiba has launched what it claims is the thinnest, lightest and smallest hard drive-based portable music player yet to grace the market.

And, looking at the pictures the company supplied, we have to say, probably the sexiest one too.

The player, the Gigabeat G20 MEG200J is just 1.27cm thick, a smidge thinner than the 1.55cm iPod. It measures 8.95 x 7.65cm and weighs 138g - the iPod is 10.25 x 6cm and weighs 158.76g.

More here

Ooooo - Pretty!

 

Hmm rather nice that wants!

 

The buttons on the side, look small fiddly and likely easy to get in the way and be pressed by accident to me. It looks like a case of design over function to me....

 

Pretty but still no Ogg support

*n

 

Why bother with a completely unknown format?

 

Unknown? The quality is nearly twice as good as mp3 (and hence 80kbps oggs sound as good as 128kbps mp3s) and it's free unlike the other new audio compressions around (such as AAC and WMA)

There are apparently other reasons not to bother supporting ogg though which are explained here: http://www.iriver.com/company/news_view.asp?idx=347

 

Yes unknown, most people have heard of MP3, but few have heard of Ogg. It doesn't matter how good the tech is if no one has heard of it, it will die a certain death.

 

It's unknown to the Plebians but there are enough people out there who would buy an Ogg player to make it financially viable...

It needs floating point calculations so it's rather processor-intensive.

*n

 

It's unfortunate that MP3 became so big so quickly, otherwise there would have been time for formats such as Ogg to gain a bit of ground.

I agree it's an immensely superior format and I use it myself. There IS a hard drive based player being made that supports the Ogg format, but I've forgotten the name,

 

On the unknown ogg subject:
If you tell your friends what ogg is and how to use it (rip/listen) they will. All of my friends now listen to ogg most of the time. (note that most of those friends are not 'computer savvy')
It works. And the way I see it, why make the source smaller when you can make the disk bigger?

 

ogg vorbis is so unhurd of that epic uses the file type for the music in UT2003.

Its a shame that it hasnt caught on much because it is better than mp3, im likling the mp4 format for music. Ive only found 1 ripper/player apart from qicktime that will play it., that being dbpoweramp. i like that ripper cos its free and it supports loads of filetypes (including ogg and lame mp3). it has a player that will play all the things u encode with it cos it uses the same codec's. Mp4 is still a beta but it gets the kinda quality ogg gets at low bitrates.

 

Now personally I prefer wav files

 

NICE i need. puts the plasticy ipod to shame

 

i love the MP3 Pro format. it works in most players and its basicly the same as ogg.

 

ogg all the way

They've even made a beta firmware for it - good on ya open source community!