I guess that also confirms the assumptions I made and posted on RB back in July and August of 2002 when I said that I believed that the Odyssey 1000 was not fully engineered and the Odyssey 1000 photo was based on a non fully functional prototype.
I believed then and continue to believe that e.Digital rushed a premature PR about the Odyssey 1000 mainly to ride on the coattails of the announcement of the iPod for Windows device, which was getting a lot of press.
The PR was indeed effective in that it doubled the share price of the stock.
However, as time revealed the truth, the Odyssey 1000 was certainly not about to hit the market and it underwent several major revisions from the feature set it so boldly announced in July 2002.
When the Ody 1000 finally shipped at the end of January 2003 (certainly not in time for the 2002 "holiday selling season,") it had a dramatically changed appearance, much less elegant than the original "iPod-esque" design. It was also lacking several features touted in the original PR, including...
- Compatibility with Mac/iTunes
- Drag n' Rip Technology
- Support for DRM
So not only was the device several months late in coming to market, but it wasn't even up to the announced specifications.
Now, 10 months after launch, EDIGers find out that it doesn't play WMA files up to specs (of using the equalizer, WOW and FF, RW features), and that it is not compatible with widely available and increasingly popular secure content.
For some reason, I really was surprised at how out of touch e.Digital seems to have become. I guess I assumed that the execs at e.Digital were at least in touch with what was going on with secure content as Internet message board posters were. It's truly sad to see they weren't.
