Tiny iPod competitors shipping soon
By Eliot Van Buskirk
Senior editor, CNET Reviews
(August 26, 2003)
As you might have noticed in our recent roundup of new Rio players, product review, and video on the new Rios, there's finally a hard drive-based MP3 player that's smaller than the iPod: the Rio Nitrus. Unlike this Toshiba unit (currently sold only in Japan) and the iPod, the Nitrus contains a one-inch hard drive that holds 1.5GB of music (about 375 songs), thus staking out the middle ground between flash and other hard drive-base players in terms of size, capacity, and price.
Rio isn't the only company hoping to fill the void between those two extremes; iRiver, RCA, Rio, Samsung, and Digitalway will also release 1.5GB hard drive-based MP3 players in the coming months. Users will be able to choose between the variety of designs offered by these companies, but the hard drives inside each of them will be identical, as there's only one company selling them: Cornice. Kevin Brangan, vice president of product marketing for Rio, says, "This technology allows us to fill a void that has always existed in the market...We can now offer consumers the smallest possible player, with lots of storage and awesome battery life." The trade-off, of course, is that 1.5GB holds a lot less than 30GB, but if you don't mind syncing a new 375 or so songs onto the device every week (and especially if the player makes it easy), you might not notice the difference.
The one-inch Cornice SE enables MP3 player manufacturers to integrate the drive into their designs more efficiently than they could with the one-inch IBM Microdrive.
(Click to enlarge.)
To find out how one little company in Colorado (a state that's rife with storage manufacturers) with 55 employees--many from Dataplay--was able to corner the market for one-inch MP3-player-embedded drives, I interviewed Melissa Kutrubes, the public relations manager for Cornice. Here's the abridged text:
MP3 Insider: How long has Cornice existed?
Melissa Kutrubes: Cornice has been a company since August 2000. We publicly announced our company June 2003. We wanted to wait to make a big bang until we had customers planning on putting Cornice-enabled devices on store shelves. We wanted to sell the product, not the idea.
M: Why do you think you are the only ones making one-inch drives?
MK: Currently, it is very difficult to build a one-inch drive because all of the parts are smaller and more delicate. We are lucky to have partners such as SAE that have experience in manufacturing delicate pieces. The other reason is that most companies have not been able to manufacture a working one-inch drive and be able to hit a price point that consumers (end users) are demanding. We sell our SE [storage element] for $65 each in 100,000 quantities. That price is low enough for our customers (companies such as RCA and Samsung) to design their consumer electronics at a favorable cost...For Cornice to hit this low price point, we completely redesigned the mechanics of our SE. We have 31 electrical components, compared to a miniaturized HDD that has an estimated 110 components. Our SE is an embedded product and, therefore, allows the host device to house the RAM and the ROM.
M: What capacities are you making now, and what do you intend to make in the future?
MK: We're making 1.5GB right now with plans to increase our capacity in the future.
M: How many have you sold and to whom?
MK: We expect to sell a half million this year, and our current customers that we are able to disclose to you are: Samsung, RCA (Thomson), iRiver, Rio (Sonicblue), and Digitalway.
M: I noticed that several of these players have missed their ship dates. Have there been delays? If so, what caused them?
MK: All of our customers said they would ship in Q3, and they still will.
M: How suitable are hard drives for jogging; is there any risk of damage?
MK: Our SE passes a very sophisticated jog profile.
