About MP3 Hardware
» Hardware history - the first portables
Since 1998 there are portable MP3 players. It was Sahaen's MP3man to be the first MP3 portable player worldwide.
The first company to bring a MP3 player to Europe was Diamond Multimedia (now Sonicblue). The product line called "Rio" introduced in that year is existing and upfront with releases of new devices.
» Technical details
Portable flash memory card players are as easy to use as any old walkman. The advance to all other devices is that they do not have any mechanical parts that move. Thus playback can not be interrupted by shaking the player. Perfect for jogging and any kind of sport that you'd like to hear music with.
The biggest negativ point are the high prices for any kind of flash memory card.
But prices have been coming down reasonably in the last years.
» CD MP3 Player
A revolution that did come soon were the first CD MP3 players. The writeable CD is incredibly cheap when it comes to prices per MB of capacity. Most MP3 CD players are portable but there are standalone hifi racks and "normal" CD players able to play back MP3 files coming into the markets massively.
The biggest negativ point in portable CD players are the ones with small displays unable to show ID3 tags and the sensibility for shaking the player around for a longer time.
» MP3s on Harddiskdrive - Jukebox player
Harddiskdrive (HDD) prices have been dropping reasonably - so the stage opens for a small jukebox players that are equipped with laptop HDDs that have from 6Gig up.
That is a lot of music - the negativ points are the high prices for jukebox players and their use of a lot of electricity/battery.
Aber nicht nur die reinen portablen MP3 Player sind im kommen, auch
» Car audio with MP3 integrated
More and more car hifi systems are able to play back MP3 CDs - nearly every company that has a name in car hifi has such a device in the product range.
There are HDD based player as well - like the Mstation (Traxaudio) and the Riocar by Sonicblue (former empegcar) but those have problems to establish because of their very high prices.
