September 11, 2005
Nano Nano
I've owned a Rio Karma since November of 2002. It's worked well enough for me everyday since then. It's been with me through SuperComputing (2002, 2003), through NEES (2002-2004), Globus (2002-present... hi WFG). Champaign, Urbana, Mount Vernon, New Orleans, New York, San Diego, Phoenix, and my move from the Midwest to the Bay Area.
But lately I've been despondent. You see, Rio's just gone out of business. It's sold all of its DAP assets to other companies and exited the field. For the past two years UKRE (UK Rio Engineers) have held out hope that the next-gen Karma will be just around the bend. Codenamed 'Chroma', it was supposed to do everything the Karma did but with a flash memory slot, a color screen, a bigger hard drive, and better media format support.
And I've held up my end of the bargain. I was a loyal Karma owner. I dutifully reset it whenever the player hung. I defended it in forum posts and even tried to assist in debugging it. I waited for the Chroma. And I waited. And I waited. And it never came.
Meanwhile, I got back into NPR, PRI, and KQED. Then I found out these stations offered podcasts of their shows. I found out that not only did iTunes handle podcasts but that iTunes handled podcasts beautifully. I didn't have to think about it. Then, on an innocent-looking day, Apple released the iPod nano.
The iPod is okay. It does playback of MP3s with iTunes integration. But it doesn't support gapless MP3 playback. It doesn't have a built-in radio tuner. On the other hand, it's where the biggest mover in this field is at. It's what everyone has bought into. So I did, too.
I named my new iPod nano nanite. It's got a day or two worth of public radio podcasts stored on it already. It has photos of my family, friends, and trips. And I like it. Actually, I don't just like it -- I <3 my nanite.
RIP Rio. It's nano nano for me from here on out.
Comments
I am currently in the market for an mp3 player.
I really love the ipod nano, but the lack of an fm tuner really bugs me. I really like my NPR station and my local college station, and more then a few shows that I listen to religiously are not currently available via podcast.
In addition, 4gb is a little small, even if the form factor is sexy.
I think I like the Zen micro and it looks like creative will soon release the Zen micro photo
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/337/C4431/
The new Zen micro photo will be $250, for 8GB, FM tuner, Voice recording, and a color screen.
Although the ipod Nano is much sexier, and itunes rocks, Zen Micro has more features & more options among online music services. It looks like the mp3 player for
Posted by: Cameron Mulder at September 12, 2005 11:32 AM
iPod does not support Vorbis (or any other kind of Ogg Streams) even though support for those is easily built-in. I own a Karma as well, and this is why I will never ever get anything from Apple until they stop being corporate a*sholes and accept open source formats. Off course people do not agree with me; their deaf ears love all the MP3 they can get.
Posted by: Ivo at October 8, 2005 9:35 AM