My twin daughters, who listen to bands with names like Garbage, Foo Fighters, and Remy Zero, are now giving me — the Gadget King himself — tips on what new toys to buy. Today, they're championing a portable digital audio source commonly called the MP3 player.
With the MP3, I'll be able to download, store, and play my favorite music from the Internet — jazz rather than their alternative — and listen to it during my morning run. No household should be without one, Frick and Frack tell me. By "no household," I guess they mean any household that watches a plasma TV flat screen, uses a digital camera, and — let's not forget — cleans with central vacuuming. Look for memory and speed! the techno twins chirp.
The Diamond Rio 500, priced at about $230, meets their requirements. It stores up to two hours of digital-quality music and up to 32 hours of spoken audio programs. The player runs on one AA alkaline battery, and has 64 megs of onboard memory — twice the memory of its predecessor, the Rio 300. It comes with a USB cable connection and headphones, too.
The Rio is now made by S3, which acquired Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., which produced the world's first portable music player.
So, it looks like one of these — did I hear two? — will be in our immediate future in order to placate the princesses. At a price, though: I have the girlgeeks looking for that special digital scheduler — you know, the one that only inputs client engagements located on a beach.
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