RSS'Commodore' Revived for Audio Players
By Ed Oswald | Published January 26, 2005, 2:26 PM
Beverly Hills and Dutch-based Yeahronimo Media Ventures announced Wednesday the acquisition of the Commodore brand and plans to resurrect it in the form of two new mobile media devices, the eVic and Mpet II.
The Mpet will be a flash based music player with a built-in FM tuner. The unit will come in two capacities, 256MB and 512MB, and will retail for $139 USD for the 512MB version. No price was given for the smaller unit.
The eVic, whose name is an allusion to Commodore's first personal computer, the VIC-20, is a hard drive based audio player with a capacity of 20GB. The eVic will be able to act as "a photo bank for digital cameras, a data bank for data and music carriers" and "an external hard drive for PC/Mac," according to the company.
"We are immensely thrilled that the newly revived Commodore brand will not only retain its superior market perception of yesteryear, but are confident our first two product offerings will follow suit," Mike J. Freni, Yeahronimo's president, said in a statement. "Never before has a brand and its trademarks come out of hibernation and truly reinvent itself to position competitively in an ever-evolving digital media marketplace."
Both players feature support for CD audio, WAV, MP3, and OGG files. Also supported will be secure WMA files, making the unit compatible with services such as Napster and MSN Music.
The Commodore name has been absent from technology since the dissolution of its Amiga brand in the mid-1990s. After lackluster sales with the rising popularity of Windows-based PCs, the company shut its doors and the name was sold to Tulip Computers NV, a Dutch computer manufacturer, in 1997. Yeahronimo then acquired the rights to the brand from Tulip to release the products under the Commodore name.
The company expects both the Mpet II and eVic to hit retail shelves during the second quarter of this year.
it seems that these guys are only using the "Commodore" name, and nothing else... the player honestly has NOTHING commodore replated to it.. they do have a Direct-to-Tv joystick with commodore games on it... but those things are short-lived little novelty items that get tossed aside once you get bored with them.
Score: 0
|I did send them an email to offer suggestions.. and I'd recommend that others do the same... if they get enough requests.. they (hopefully) will add some features.
-[Copy of email]-----------------------------------------
First off, I want to applaude you for bringing back the Commodore name... that being said, 2 things (suggestions, don't panic)
1. the portable media players, since they bare the Commodore name, they be able to support commodore music files as well. that'd boost sale to commodore fans alone... ( .sid, .mus. dat) all from the High-Voltage Sid collection....
2. the Direct-toTv game system, how about a flash card feature? that way you can save games that support saving, and even be able to sell more games for the unit?.. that way it doesn't become a simple novelty item, that gets tossed aside once you get bored with the same games... (and even support for the .d64 & .t64 images from the emulation scene, I would definately buy that system then!! )
Just a suggestion....
Michael xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
------------------------------------------
Score: 0
|The DTV is great, it's designer left some serious hack-a-bility in it. Little bit of solder and you have a working C64 complete with floppy drive, keyboard and svideo out. Yeah, it's modernized 1982 technology, but that's why it's cool.
Score: 0
|If this thing carries the Commodore name, it should be able to do something extra like play .Sid files. The multimedia features of the Commodore is what made it great, and there is a big following for Commodore music.
Score: 0
|I think it's about time that support for the superior OGG format is pushed toward the mainstream consumer masses. Its implementation in such media devices will most certainly produce gleams of joy and high praise from the open source community. It will ensure that we shed ourselves from the obsolete and outdated format that is/was once known as mp3..
Score: 0
|Get an iRiver.
Score: 0
|Or a Rio Karma. Or a Rio Carbon (I think). Or any of the reasonably large number of players that now support it.
The only thing holding up OGG support was originally the lack of a pure integer-based decoder. That was dealt with a couple of years ago, and now the only problem is that it requires more processing power to decode OGG than most other formats.
From what I recall reading, the older-generation iPods couldn't conceivably have done it, but the newer ones could, if programmed correctly. Still, it would be very much against Apple's business model to allow this.
Score: 0
|