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iPod's on the prize
Apple's portable jukebox is the class of the field

Benny Evangelista Monday, July 29, 2002


If music is your life, then you probably have hundreds of CDs lying around the house. But imagine if you could stuff all of those songs into one tiny box that fits in your pocket, making your music available every place you go?

Thanks to the same MP3 revolution that brought us Napster Inc. and do-it- yourself CDs, those pocket-sized jukeboxes are here, with an increasing variety of choices, led by the iPod from Apple Computer Inc.

Introduced in October, the iPod was the first of its kind to be small enough to fit comfortably in a shirt pocket, yet big enough to store a music fan's library of songs. In its first two months on sale, the iPod grabbed nearly 5 percent of the entire portable MP3 player market for 2001, according to the research firm In-Stat/MDR.

The problem was the iPod only worked with the Cupertino computer-maker's own proprietary Macintosh operating system, which excluded the other 95 percent of the computer world.

That left the window wide open for competitors like Santa Clara's Sonicblue Inc. and Creative Technologies Inc. in Milpitas to jump in with portable digital music jukeboxes for the PC crowd. Both Sonicblue's Rio Riot and Creative's Nomad 3 are competitive iPod alternatives, but still don't measure up to the iPod, either in size or ease of use.

But Apple has finally decided to produce iPods for Windows. And after getting an early peek last week at the latest models, it's clear the iPod will continue to set the pace.

Whether they fly off the shelves is a different matter. The iPods still cost two or three times more than a CD player that also plays MP3s.

The iPods also require Windows ME, Windows 2000 or Windows XP, and they can't be converted easily if you switch to a Mac.

And the iPods still require FireWire, a high-speed data connection developed by Apple, which complicates things for Windows users who only have a Universal Serial Bus or even the new USB 2.0, which is slightly faster than FireWire.

Having high transfer speed is a big factor when you're talking about sending 400 albums from computer to a portable device. With FireWire, data transfers at up to 50 MB per second. But with a USB 1.1 connection, it's only 1.5 MB per second.

One CD that took 6 seconds to transfer to an iPod took 8 minutes to beam over to a Nomad 3 using a USB connection.

You have to ask yourself whether you really need 4,000 songs on the road. If all you want is two to six hours of music, then a flash memory player like the new 192-MB, $250 Rio 900 or Creative's $170, 128-MB MuVo -- as small as a cigarette lighter and less than 1 ounce -- are more than sufficient.

Yet any music lover would find it compelling to have an entire CD collection -- or all the songs he or she has downloaded -- at the ready, prepared for any musical mood shift. That is when a portable jukebox like the iPod shines.

First, a brief history rewind: When portable MP3 players hit the market in 1998, they were a breakthrough because they had no moving parts like a spinning CD or cassette tape. MP3 music files were stored on flash memory, making players compact, light and skip-proof.

But the high cost of flash memory limited storage capacity, meaning you either had to keep listening to the same tunes over and over, or keep reloading new music. With the growing popularity of recordable CD burners, portable CD players that also play MP3 files are now on pace to outsell flash- memory players by 2003, In-Stat analyst Cindy Wolf said.

Fast forward to October 2001, when Apple introduced the iPod with a 5-GB hard drive, enough capacity for about 1,000 songs. The iPod wasn't the first hard-drive portable music player, but the iPod was the first that was small and light enough to rival flash-memory players.


APPLE'S LATEST CROP
Apple's new iPods have improved on the original, with a 10-GB model priced at $400 and a 20-GB model costing $500. Both will be available in early August for Mac users and late August for Windows users. Apple has dropped the price of the original 5-GB model by $100, to $300.

The new iPods have the same ivory-and-silver case, but Apple has replaced the center controller wheel with a touch-wheel similar to a laptop touch pad.

The touch wheel acts and feels the same as the physical wheel, but without the moving part. The touch wheel also enabled Apple to make the 10-GB iPod slightly thinner than the original.

Navigating through the iPod's functions remains easy and can be done with one hand, unlike other jukebox players.

There is now a protective case and belt clip included with the 10- and 20- GB models and a cover to keep dirt out of the FireWire port. Also new is a small remote control attached to the headphone wires.

Instead of Apple's own iTunes program, the Windows iPods will use MusicMatch, a popular music playback and organizing program that already has about 25 million users. MusicMatch will include a handy feature found in iTunes that synchronizes playlists and songs on the computer and the iPod.

Apple upgraded iTunes with Smart Playlists, which among other functions creates song playlists for the iPod that automatically compiles songs by favorite artists, genres or music most (or least) frequently played.


SONICBLUE'S RIO RIOT
That feature isn't entirely unique: Sonicblue's $350 Rio Riot, which also has 20 GB of storage, has a feature called Rio DJ that creates playlists instantly without having to connect to a computer, as long as you have enough songs already loaded.

I particularly liked the "Entertain Me" selection, which gives you a random list of songs tailored to whatever length of time you need. You can also tell the Riot to pick from specific eras, such as "Sounds of the 1940s."

The Rio Riot, which is Windows and Mac compatible, is a decent portable jukebox and comes from the Santa Clara company that makes the market-leading flash MP3 players.

But two iPods easily fit into the same space as the paperback-book sized Rio Riot, which weighs 10 ounces. The 20-GB iPod, the size of a deck of cards, weighs 7.2 ounces.

Although the Riot is fairly easy to figure out, its navigation buttons and scroll wheel are not nearly as manageable as the iPod's. And one glaring design flaw is the combination USB port-headphone jack, which is placed right next to the AC adapter jack. Neither is marked, and two or three times I mistakenly tried to charge the battery by plugging the AC adapter into the headphone jack.


CREATIVE'S NOMAD 3
That isn't a problem with the $400, 20-GB Nomad 3, which also has features that go far beyond the iPod. In fact, Creative Technologies intentionally designed the Nomad 3 for the high-tech gadget set. There's even a 40-GB version that costs $500.

The Windows-only Nomad uses both FireWire (Sonicblue labels it SB1394) and USB for file transferring, and can record directly from a CD without having to first convert and store the song on a computer.

The Nomad 3 also has two line-out connections to tie into a home stereo system and an optical line-in connection that can be used to to record directly from a variety of sources.

But the Nomad 3 is the size of a regular CD player and weighs 10.5 ounces without the batteries. Both the Nomad 3 and the Rio Riot fit into a coat pocket, but they wouldn't be comfortable to wear while jogging.

There are other players in the hard-drive jukebox player category, such as the $200, 10-GB Roq-It from D-Link Systems Inc. of Irvine. And San Diego's E. Digital Corp. announced it will have a $350, 20-GB, voice-activated jukebox that closely resembles the iPod ready in the fall.

But for now, the iPods have it.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/07/29/BU197129.DTL&type=b...
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