More competition for Karma ?

The register just posted this about the new Toshiba 20gig portable player.

It's smaller than the iPod, doesn't even look half bad IMO (except for the screen which I find too small), but it doesn't have NEAR as many features as Karma. So I guess we're pretty safe!

I'd heard that this hardware was going to be impressive; unfortunately, Toshiba has a history of badly designed, buggy software and this WMA9 stuff doesn't bode well.

I think austonia from DAPreview presented one MAJOR flaw from their previous model. The Toshiba digital audio players encrypt the music that's going onto the player, and it will not let you transfer it off the player onto another computer for example (therefore it wasn't able to use it as a hard drive, or file storage). I think that it still has this feature, and that was one flaw that produced unsatisfactory results for their first player. The encryption also degrades the quality of the music I think.

Another flaw that I can see is.. how are you supposed to hold it? It does not look very comfortable to hold or navigate, I guess all they cared about was how slim it was and nothing else heh.

All I can say is... Boy is the Karma ever going to look good in comparison reviews.

It degrades the music? That's a bit strange to say the least and a very complicated DRM mechanism to say the least. The only possible thing I can think of is that it's transcoding everything into WMA format and using the DRM built into that format.

Okay maybe not. Hehe.

People say that it adds an extension to the files, .smd or something, and the encryption makes the whole process of loading music onto the player slower.