It speaks!!! Whoa.

Also, I'm so amused that it's 4 GB for $79, because I still have an ancient 4 GB iPod Mini (still has a B/W screen, that's how old it is) that cost WAY more than $79.

The very first hard-drive-based mp3 players were 4 or 5 GB, right? I almost bought one of those.

Someone brought one to the first F2F in Evanston, I recall....

That may have been me. I bought a 5GB iPod in 2002.

Nah, that F2F was in 2001, right? What was the company that made that player? It was much bigger than an iPod and sorta' round shaped.

Ah, go here and scroll down: Creative Nomad Jukebox

This $500 player was a big hit for Creative. It had a 6GB hard drive, and despite the size it sold great numbers. The Nomad Jukebox was one of the best MP3 players ever made both sound quality wise and feature wise, with more features than you find on many MP3 players even today.

Beside the headphone jack, it had two line-out jacks and a line-in jack. It had a parametric equalizer, spatialization settings and environmental settings which allowed you to adjust output according to what kind of room you were in. It even came with real headphones and not the standard plugs normally included with players.

My first hard-drive-based mp3 player was the Archos Jukebox Multimedia - it was 20 GB.

I had a 128MB Rio MP3 player way back in the day. By the time I went to Best Buy to get a bigger memory card, that kind of flash memory had been all but discontinued and it was cheaper to just buy a whole new player.

Yeah, the Rio was my first MP3 player. I bought the memory card shortly after buying the Rio. With the memory card, its memory was in two separate spaces, and you had to upload songs to either built-in memory or card memory. (So to completely load it required two operations.)

The most annoying thing was the battery latch wasn't very good, and was always popping open.

With the memory card, its memory was in two separate spaces, and you had to upload songs to either built-in memory or card memory. (So to completely load it required two operations.)

Annoyingly, this is how my digital camera works too. If there's an SD card, it will write to that, but if not it will write to the onboard memory (which is teeny). The problem is that if I accidentally take a picture without an SD card, I can't get it off the camera because my computer has decided it will only recognize the card reader and not the camera itself.

Which is kind of a random tangent, but there you go.

Hmmm... some people are complaining that the new Shuffle has a proprietary headphone jack. Apple reveals new, super-tiny iPod Shuffle with huge design flaw

ION, USB finger

[Jerry] lost his finger in an accident and has since added a prosthetic USB flash drive in its place. It’s making the best of a bad situation; there’s nothing wrong with a little voluntary cyborgization. At least it’s not as invasive as some of the implants we’ve seen before.

Freaky!

some people are complaining that the new Shuffle has a proprietary headphone jack.

That does seem foolish. Why not have the controls in the cord, but put a standard female headphone jack at the other end of the cord, instead of earbuds?

Apple has been all about the proprietary mini-sized ports these days.