iRiver has announced they will no longer produce/distribute iRiver music players in many markets/countries. For more info see the news article at:

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/9662/

I was surprised to hear this, as MTV's new URGE music service heavily promotes the iRiver Clix player.

Yes that is a surprise as I thought they were quite a good company, great players I used to have a Iriver H320

man... wonder what made them leave...?

i think this is a diplomatic formulation of 'they fired half of the people'

seems no one can compete with apple in the DAPs market.
Sad, but my hat is off to Mr. Steve Jobs. A superb business man. He truly showed what he can accomplish with the iPod thingie.

Bunch of bullshit if you ask me. The only countries that the Ipod really does well in are the U.S and the U.K and that's, because they practically shove the damn thing down your throat. None the less the marketing stratedgy and because Americans like have their asses kissed what do you expect?. It's a shame the company is going to stop making DAP, although even IRiver had dodgy support in their products. Urge it's more like Purge if you ask me, as was mentioned before ;-D. They probably have a good chance at succeeding though.

In Mexico too, you know, iPod is a synonim for digital audio player.

I think that is pretty much the case for every country tech-savvy enough to know what a DAP is.

Unless we are talking about China or Korea...

same in Argentina, iPod is *MP3* player

This is sad, the competition is truly tough.

I hear iPod is doing well in Japan and that's a significant market.

I guess I was douped again . I kind of reminds me of Creative and how if group of a developers or another audio company comes along they pretty much go postal on you in lew of a hostile takeover.

Same thing in Brazil. Easiest way for me to explain what is my iRiver to non-techie people is "It's an iPod, but from another manufacturer"

**sigh** just throwing fuel on the fire now . Well this is why communities like HA exist.

I doubt 15000 geeks would make any difference marketwise....


edit: corrected the number of geeks

Are you kidding me? do you know how much the Neuros guys who were in marketing estimated they could make off of the hardcore open-source audio geeks? revenues that exceed $2 billion if we wanted to talk in terms of numbers. I mean there is always a "slim" chance. They were considering using the Rockbox as standard issue firmware in the Neuros III.

OK, that is definitely bullshit.

Possible. Let me see if I can find the transcript again. It was awhile ago. It's just a theoretical estimated figure anyway not that would happen.

That number is just madness. A little math: considering an average DAP price of 300 dollars, it would take 6.6million "hardcore open-source audio geeks" to faithfully buy their player for them to reach 2B revenue. I doubt there are 6 million such geeks worldwide, let alone in North America alone (which seems to be the only place Neuros markets their products)


BTW, did they open source their firmware already, or are they still dangling that carrot in front of their hapless fans? If not, what is the latest excuse? I fondly recall "issues with the WMA libs, that must be kept closed" (non issue if you go with anything but the GPL) and "lack of compiler, which would force people to buy TI's toolchain" (that isn't keeping them opening sources, that would just keep third parties from compiling the sources themselves. Said parties could still submit patches for features and bugfixes back to Neuros)

Here is the transcript:








They were talking about the TI toolchain and how much of a PITA that would be in the transcript. I looked into it a little also.

http://www.rockbox.org/Neuros-chat-20050920.txt

Of course, that was just BS.

I mean the transcript.

They were just making numbers up.

Oh, yeah, I completely forgot about the Rockbox possibility. Another dangling carrot.

Won't happen. They want to mix Rockbox with several binary-only closed source stuff (video part, TI IP, etc). That breaks Rockbox's GPL on several levels.

Neuros is full of it. They act as best friends of the FSF crowd, but all their talk about "openness" has been nothing but rhetoric so far.


PS: Last dangling carrot I just remembered: remember their talk about Musepack support coming to Neuros? Not that I care about Musepack, but heh...

I believe you. I am not saying your wrong.



Again that's what the Rockbox is good for.

Thank you, Apple. Thank you, Mr. Jobs. Thank you, mindless crowd of sheep. Thank you very much.

can you explain your words? after much study, i came to the conclusion that a nano was the best choice, so maybe i missed something.

Well, for one, many say the sound quality of the Ipods are inferior to that of the competitors (namely, Iriver and Cowon). That's no easy claim to properly substantiate, though, with all variables considered.

I did also decide to buy an iPod, after careful consideration. I wanted to get a Rockbox-player, and first tried to find some of the iRivers. But I couldn't get hold of one, so after some time I bought an old 4G iPod (I bought it solely because of Rockbox, Apple's firmware is completely useless to me. And I more or less despise these players for their trendyness and undeserved popularity). I believe it is an reasonable assumption that there will be devoted lots of resources to the development of the firmware for the iPods, because of their widespread use.

But even though some of us have solid reasons for choosing an iPod, I do believe that in many cases Never_Again's comment is deserved. I am under the impression that to most people, a DAP IS an iPod.

I dare them prove it.

Could be that a market (DAPs) that is all but a monopoly (Apple) is unlikely to serve the interests of consumers better than one where several viable companies/products are competing for your money.

What disgusts me the most is that they crush these small players by sheer virtue of their marketing clout, a magnificent triumph of style over substance. Buy every square inch of ad space in major metropolitan subway stations and you'd have a product everyone wants too! Just type "free iPod" into your favorite search engine and watch your computer explode!

The iPod has evolved into such a Godzilla of the DAP market that it would take another industry giant's Mothra for there to be even a remotely fair battle (which, as we know from the movies, only leads to more destruction), though so far these efforts have been pathetically futile. Sony? Sure, make a digital "walkman" that only plays atrac.

Then there's the whole iPod + iTunes. Kinda like during the industrial revolution, when the factory that employed all the townspeople also happened to own the only general store in town.

And yet I own an iPod.

Maybe he is referring to the new iDon't compaign that SanDisk is waging against all iPod users saying they are mindless sheep. See Samsumg's iDon't site for a good laugh at:

http://www.idont.com/

And, yes, this is a real marketing campaign that SanDisk launched recently for this DAP, and not a bogus fake site. They are calling all freethinkers to get free from iTatorship (I guess it stands for iPod Dictatorship).

Any prediction when SanDisk will be the next DAP maker to fold in the DAP market like iRiver just announced? Especially if they are trying to win iPod customers by insulting them by calling them sheep...

I hate monopolies. But in this case, at least IMHO, apple got it cause they have the "better product/price". Thats it.

PS: I own an SlimX from iRiver. I'm still waiting after 4 years for vorbis support.

It's got to the point were it really is that ridiculous though.



It's a sad world we live in.



My thoughts exactly.

Well, the iPod is all the craze here in my country too... I whipped out my iPaq, play a song, and this guy sitting beside me asked, "Is that an iPod?"

Well, Apple got good marketing this time. They market iPod as "cool". While all other DAPs and PDAs are marketed as "techie".

AFAIK most of 'em non-geeks prefer "cool" than "techie"... oh, the humanity!

With a lack of better words on my part Apple is now a marketing whore with many T.V. ad's, etc., who has suprisingly well made the iPod an in-home name as well known as Nintendo and PlayStation. From the other manufacturers of such devices I haven't seen one T.V. ad.

Also after watching the news this morning Apple and Nike have teamed up to have Nike running/walking shoes communicate with the iPod.

Sometime ago, I took a flight to Sydney. While I was listening to radio with my mobile phone before the plane took off, a flight flight attendant came to me and asked me to turn my ipod off.

Well, for some people, it seem Ipod is synonymous with any portable device that have earbud.

Those people need to get a clue and educate themselves, if I was using my 15-20 year old (don't remember how old it is) Sony Walkman cassette player and if someone asked me if it was an iPod I'd probably die laughing.

It really is a sad state...while I like some of what Apple has implemented in their products, I am no fan of their money-grabbing internal battery decision across all their models (they offer no alternative like the competitors do of which I'm aware). Yes, I'm aware you can purchase the battery and replace it yourself (if you have tools small enough) but that is not what I call user-friendly. Iriver got too flashy and veered from their original business plan too much by making inferior products compared to previous generations.

Blah! SanDisk is just disgruntled because Apple chose Samsung instead of them to supply flash memory



They don't even care. Anyone insisting to them about "say DAP instead of iPod" will be looked upon as a moronic geek.

Geeks have the Rockbox firmware. That's all that it's important reguardless of the situation. Buy back that last IRiver H300 off Ebay and load the firmware on and indulge.

You know, people in Korea just say "MP3" to mean "DAP." Weird.

That's too sad, well if they ask what bitrate it is just say something weirder like 5 ounces.

Does anyone know if the Dell DAP's are any good?

This seems to be kind of rumour, I just cannot find any official data on it...
If "iRiver has announced", where is the announcement itself?

I've only just looked into this topic. I've read the English news report, and the original Korean news report at chosun.com.

In the Korean report, the CEO mentions that the company will diversify their products; he didn't say anything about moving out of the DAP market.

The Korean report does say they removed their salesmen from almost all foreign countries.

Same here, in Canada. Either an "mp3" or an "mp3 player" (which is a bit better, but still).

Edit: Oh shit, just revived an old thread... sorry. I was searching for the itunes square bug then found this.