October 05, 2005
Radio has its eye on podcasters
Podcasters have already inspired conventional radio stations to evolve.
But their podcasts will increasingly be on the radar of traditional radio broadcasters as fertile grounds to feed the desire for new talent, and ideas.
Both the BBC and Virgin will watch what podcasters do, learning from them, just as podcasters learned from radio.
"It won't be too long before this [podcasting] becomes the normal route to discover new talent," says Chris Kimber, head of BBC Radio Interactive.
He was just one of more than 100 podcasters at Europe's inaugural podcasting conference, in London - PodcastConUK.
06:06 AM in Music, News | Permalink
September 30, 2005
Nokia's ace new music phone
We were going to do a long post about Nokia’s new music phone the 3250, but ShinyShiny got there first. Suffice to say that it looks great, sports a really cool twisty design that makes it easy to use both the music player and the camera, features a cool two mega pixel camera and has one Gigabyte of memory – which mobile spotters will tell you is twice as much as the Motorola/Apple ROKR and the Sony Ericsson W800i Walkman phone. It also has a neat 262k colour screen, Bluetooth and an FM radio. Music playback is ten hours per charge and users drag and drop tracks on to the device (hurrah).
Doh! That’s almost a long post. Over to your Sony Ericsson and Motorola/ Apple…
06:03 AM in Cell Phones, MP3 players, Music | Permalink
September 22, 2005
Belkin Prepares To Release The TuneFM
Our friends at iPodStudio.com are reporting that iPod accessory company, BELKIN, is about to release a new device known as the TuneFM.
TuneFM is a FM Transmitter that allows you to listen to music on your iPod via any FM stereo receiver.
Belkin explains: “Proximity switches give you total control at the touch of your fingertips, and the LED display indicates FM frequency and memory preset, eliminating the need to use the iPod interface for frequency selection; because the TuneFM is powered by the iPod no batteries are required.”
No price info is available at this point.
06:05 AM in Apple iPod, MP3 players, Music | Permalink
June 20, 2005
Three New iRiver Players: U10, T20 and T30
iRiver (ReignCom) showed at a launch event in Korea three new portable media players. Photos and specifications have been posted on the misticriver discussion board. The most interesting one is the new iRiver U10, which sports a cool thumb interface.
iRiver calls its new user interface D-Click. The buttons are on the borders of the screen. Only the border area is touch sensitive.
The iRiver U10 supports MP4 video, Macromedia Flash, MP3, WMA, OGG and ASF music playback. The U10 has a 2.2" QVGA (320x240) TFT screen.
Besides the nice look the iRiver U10 also features FM-Tuner, Voice recorder, Photo album, txt viewer, direct encoding and games. The iRiver U10 will come in 512MB and 1GB storage configurations.
No word yet when the U10 will be available. It looks like a winner.
06:28 AM in MP3 players, Music | Permalink
May 13, 2005
Sony Direct DVD Camcorder, the DCR-DVD7E
Sony has launched their new DVD camcorder which features an odd circular design and direct DVD recording. The DCR-DVD7E records your footage straight to a DVD disc so you can instantly watch the footage on your DVD player.
The DVD7E will feature a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar Lense with 10x optical zoom and a 2.5-inch LCD screen. DVD formats include DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW. No release dates indicated, but expect to the new camcorder to set you back approximately $1200.
06:08 AM in Digital Cameras, Gadgets, MP3 players, Music | Permalink
May 10, 2005
The best digital music players
It might be easy to forget that there are companies besides Apple Computer that make portable digital-music players. In fact, the market for portable players, which initially used flash memory instead of hard drives, was born way back in 1998.
FORBES Best MP3 players
• Zen Nano Plus Compare Price
• iPod Shuffle Compare Price
• iFP-799
• Rave MP Sport AMP: 1.0 Compare Price
• Rio Forge Sport Compare Price
06:09 AM in Apple iPod, MP3 players, Music | Permalink
May 05, 2005
MPIO-one micro media player
I don't know how practical the MPIO-one is, considering it's a movie player with a ONE inch screen, but it certainly solves the problem of
portable media players being too bulky to really carry around easily. It's flash memory so it's extremely lightweight, just over an ounce, but storage only goes up to 1 GB. The MPIO-one can play mp3 and wma
files as well as jpeg images and text. Of course you'll go blind trying to see anything on the screen, but it can be done. The MPIO-one, unlike so many other media players actually comes with software that will convert many types of video files (ASF, AVI, MPEG, WMV) into an MPEG-4 file that's playable on the device.
I saw lots of movie players of this size at CES in January, and while I was predictably blown away by their tiny size, they weren't exactly very useful. I am pretty skeptical about anybody ever getting the portable movie player right because I'm not sure there's a need. If you've got time to painstakingly convert video at home, you've got time to watch America's Next Top Model (not that I do). I latched on to the idea quickly and had an Archos Multimedia Jukebox with a 2 inch screen several years ago and watched half a season of Buffy on it, but because the battery life was so bad, I had to do it while the thing was plugged in, which, of course, defeats the purpose of having a portable. My niece has one of the newer players and while the battery life is a little better, rarely will it stay alive long enough to let you watch an entire feature-length movie.
MPIO-one will be available in May in Japan, no announcements for the rest of the world yet.
06:09 AM in Digital Cameras, MP3 players, Music | Permalink
April 18, 2005
EWT950 Wireless FM Transmitter for $10 shipped
Surplus Computers still offers the Emerson EWT950 Wireless FM Transmitter for $9.99. With free shipping, it's among the least expensive FM transmitters we've seen. Of note, the Griffin iTrip and iTrip mini FM Transmitters are still $24 each at Amazon.com.
06:19 AM in Apple iPod, Gadgets, MP3 players, Music | Permalink
April 07, 2005
Dorothy Parker's iPod Shuffle range
So the latest influence on iPod accessory designs is err Dorothy Parker… Looking like an art-deco refugee from the Algonquin Hotel in New York in the 1920s the DecoDock
is basically a standard station for the iPod Shuffle. The only key difference is that its retro white columns illuminate when the iPod Shuffle is plugged in. It’ll be available in the US shortly for both Mac and PC owners at the pretty reasonable price of $28. Read.
06:00 AM in Apple iPod, MP3 players, Music | Permalink
April 04, 2005
Cowon's personal media player
Here at TD we like to feel we have a special relationship with Korean manufacturer Cowon as we were first to spot its fantastic super slim iAudio M3 hard disk audio player at CES way back in 2004. So we are very excited by the news that the company is now sizing up the personal media player market too with the impending launch of the A2.
From the look of the player and its line up of features it sounds as if the company has once again got it spot on. The A2 will play just about everything; including MP3, WMA, Ogg and WAV audio, DivX and WMV
video and JPEG, GIF and BMP image files. It has striking looking white and grey casing, boasts a four inch widescreen (16:9) monitor, is available with a 20, 40 or 60 Gigabyte hard disk and sports an input that enable it to record directly from a TV. The company's traditional UK distributors reckon it will land here in the summer. Can’t wait.
06:06 AM in Gadgets, MP3 players, Music, News | Permalink