After finding that Apple had a huge marketshare in portable music players, Sony, who revolutionized the portable music market 25 years back decided to step in. So they introduced the Sony Network Walkman which got many things right. The Sony device is smaller and has a much better battery life. But they decided to screw up in the most important area, the format of the songs. They decided not to support any of the popular music formats, including MP3.

One major downside of the new Walkman is that it can’t play MP3 files, or any of the other standard formats. It can play back only a proprietary Sony format called ATRAC3, or a variation called ATRAC3plus. This means that, when you transfer your MP3 files to the new Walkman, Sony’s PC software must laboriously convert them first into ATRAC3 files. Sony claims it designed the player this way because ATRAC3 produces superior sound, and because it has features that extend battery life.

For my test, I used a very modest collection of 431 standard MP3 files. SonicStage 2 refused to transfer 15 of the files, posting a nonsensical error message. After that, it took an agonizingly long two hours and 13 minutes to transfer the remaining 416 tracks to the Walkman. By contrast, Apple’s iTunes software transferred all 431 songs to an iPod in about four minutes.

[via WSJ]
Will this kill the iPod ? I don’t think so.

Till recently I was using “newsmonster”:http://newsmonster.org/ as my newsreader. It worked ok on Firefox 0.8. But now that I have upgraded to “Firefox 0.9”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/, the newsreader has stopped working.
I tried “RSS Reader”:http://www.rssreader.com/, but it brings up old articles again and again as if they are new. What newsreader do you use ?

Since GMail is offering 1GB storage, the Folks at “Yahoo!”:http://mail.yahoo.com have increased my mailbox capacity to 100MB. This was a meagre 6MB before. They have also increased the message size to 10MB. I wonder when Hotmail is going to follow.
Competition is good. Competition is very good.

It was only a few months back that I bought the “Sony Clie TH55”:https://varnam.org/archives/000345.html after over-analyzing various PDAs. Now Sony has announced that they are no longer going to release PDAs for the American Market. This means there will only be Palm devices running the Palm OS. I always found that Sony Clie’s looked much more elegant than Palm Devices while running the same OS.
bq. Mr. Limp told Brighthand that this simply continues the trend toward consolidation of marketshare in the traditional PDA business to two major players, HP in the Pocket PC arena and palmOne in the Palm OS arena. “The market is in transition from a standalone PDA market to a wireless communicator market,” said Mr. Limp. When asked whether Sony would be releasing a Palm OS-based communicator in the future, Mr. Limp said “there are no guarantees in this world.” [“Brighthand”:http://www.brighthand.com/article/sayonara_clie]
“PDA Buyers Guide”:http://www.pdabuyersguide.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Board=news&Number=11594 has the following reasons for the annoucement.
* Sony had 20% of the Palm OS market in Q1, down from 25% in 2003, not good.
* Sony as a company is struggling financially. They need to concentrate on game consoles and games, and other bread and butter ventures.
* Sony is trying to buy MGM, which involves a great deal of money.
* The Clie’s high end multimedia niche didn’t pay off.
* They came out with 30 different models and that made for hard work to differentiate models.
* Innovation slacked, with the UX50 being the last innovative model, and that came out 1 year ago.
* Sony Clie models are expensive to produce.
* Sony didn’t keep pace with PalmOne restructing and cost reduction.
* PalmOne products are cutting into Sony territory: T3, Zire 71 and 72.
* Only 160,000 PDAs shipped in Japan last year. Todd wonders how worthwhile PDA sales in Japan are since high end feature phones are king there.

I have been evaluating various PDAs for quite sometime and had settled on the Sony Clie TJ-35. I ogled for quite a while without actually buying the device till Sony withdrew it from the market and came out with three new devices. I decided not to waste anymore time and got myself the “Sony Clie TH55”:http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-Start;sid=y6bL-RdWzUfL3FcKeUDB8lhG9hLnF6qr1_k=?CategoryName=hp_Multimedia&ProductSKU=PEGTH55%2fU&Dept=hp
This device has a 320×480 high resolution display, a camera with 2x optical zoom, audio and video player and integrated Wi-Fi. Considering that I used to own a Palm III before this, it is like owning a Lexus RX after driving a Toyota Corolla.
Brighthand has the “review”:http://www.brighthand.com/article/Sony_Clie_TH55_Review?site=Palm of the TH55 and PalmZone has a “comparison”:http://www.palmzone.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=191 of TH55 and Palm T3. The best site for keeping track of Clie news is “ClieSource”:http://cliesource.com/
Software sources for the Palm are
* “Sonystyle”:http://sonyelectronics.sonystyle.com/micros/clie/software/index.html
* “Palm Gear”:http://palmgear.com/

Off late there have been tendencies by gadget makers to produce two versions of the same device, one for the American market and one for the European market. Most of the time, both models will have the same features, and the only difference would be that the American one would not have Bluetooth.
The first one was “Sony Clie TH-55”:http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-Start;sid=aOUcBKxASDIcNOwIfK4WD-NPXb8jIorOnm4=?CategoryName=hp_Multimedia&ProductSKU=PEGTH55%2fU&Dept=hp This is a new PDA which features integrated Wi-Fi, a camera, high resolution screen and built-in audio player. That’s for the American market. The “UK Version”:http://www.expansys-usa.com/product.asp?code=TH55 features all of the above plus Bluetooth
The next product to do this is “Dell Axim PDA”:http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/axim_x3_wireless?c=uk&l=en&s=pad
And the reason ?
bq. “Nokia and Ericsson are driving Bluetooth heavily in Europe,” said Kris Karppi, Dell EMEA product manager for Axim. “The market for in-vehicle GPS is also greater in Europe, he said, adding that most of these systems use Bluetooth antennae. There are also “a lot of proprietary solutions for cable replacement,” he said, and a strong corporate customer base that could drive Bluetooth use. With all that, Dell had “no hesitation at all” in launching a Bluetooth version in Europe, said Karppi.
bq. ?The picture in the US is rather different, showing considerable hesitation and perhaps a U-turn or two. The company told IDG’s PC World at the launch that it would “eventually” offer a Bluetooth device, but did not say where, only pointing out that Bluetooth demand is stronger in Europe.?

Few days back we blogged on the disappointment on the pricing of the new mini iPod. “Alex Salkever”:http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2004/tc2004017_5927_tc056.htm of Businessweek also thinks so.
bq. Even Jobs’s Jedi-esque powers of reality dispersion can’t alter the unfavorable math behind Apple’s new offering. Here are the hard numbers. The new miniPod will cost $249. That’s about $100 more than the rumor sites had posited. It will offer 4 gigabytes of capacity on its hard drive. By comparison, the entry-level iPod now costs $299 and has 15 gigabytes of disk space. The miniPod’s cost per gigabyte is $62.50. In the entry-level iPod, it’s about $20.
bq. So Apple is asking customers to pay three times as much per gigabyte. I have one word for that. Ouch.
But now HP is going to release an “HP version”:http://www.macminute.com/2004/01/09/hpipod of the iPod under licence from Apple. The HP Digital Music Player is to be _priced competitively to other digital music players currently available_. Also HP is going to pre-install “iTunes”:https://varnam.org/archives/000272.html and a link to Apple’s iTunes music store.
“Dan Gillmor”:http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001649.shtml#001649 thinks that Microsoft will have to work harder and spend more to achieve the domination it wants. With Real Networks and Sony announcing Online Music stores, Microsoft can soon throw a spanner into the works by starting their own music store and requring resellers to have a link to their store instead.

For the past few months there have been many rumors about the new mini iPod. The present iPod models are very expensive, and so the rumors were that the new ones would cost $99. That turned out to be wishful thinking. In MacWorld, Steve Jobs “announced”:http://wirelessnewsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Apple__New_iPod_Mini__MS_Office_Update&story_id=22951&category=hndhld that the new 4GB models would cost $249. If you pay $50 more, you can get a 10GB iPod.
There are many MP3 players which offer the same set of features offered by iPod, but none of them can match the elegance of an iPod. Also Apple is not a company known for low priced devices. They may not be market leaders in terms of hardware, but they have a cult following, which swears by their products.
I would have bought an iPod, for the coolness factor, but it is way too expensive.

bq. Today’s vital technology standards are largely controlled by companies and consortia from the developed world. China and other nations effectively pay taxes to American, Japanese and European companies in order to use these standards in a variety of fields including computers, communications and personal technology.
bq. But China, unlike other developing nations that lack its growing clout on the global stage, isn’t planning to keep paying these taxes. It’s political-economic establishment is absolutely determined to set its own path in the Digital Age.
bq. China isn’t just reluctant to pay what amount to taxes to the developed-world owners of global technology standards. With the largest domestic market on the planet, at least potentially, plus an increasingly creative and well-educated workforce, China is creating its own competitive set of standards for its own market, although the global potential is obvious.
The business wars of the digital age are begining.
[via “dan gillmor”:http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001580.shtml#001580]

For the past month or so, I have been using “iTunes”:http://www.apple.com/itunes/overview.html on my Windows laptop to listen to music and have become a fan of Apple software. iTunes is just like Windows Media Player or an y other Juke Box out there. But the feature I like the best is called “Smart Playlist”:http://www.apple.com/itunes/smartplaylists.html.
This works similar to a normal playlist, except that it is dynamically updated. You can set the codition for the list, like say, all songs by Yesudas, in the language Malayalam, which has been listened to atleast 3 times but not greater than 10 times. So during the normal course of listening, when a song qualifies under this category, it appears in that smart list. So as I listen to my library, songs get classified into various smart lists I have created.
This is the first piece of software that Apple has released for Windows and is amazing.