Back in 2000 a marvellous item went on sale: Creative's 6GB DAP Jukebox. This was arguably the MP3 player that started it all*: The Napster pioneers had popularised MP3 and now here was something which let you play your entire music library away from your PC. OK, so the battery performance was woeful, the USB 1.1 interface meant transfers took hours and encoding your CDs on contemporary PCs was a labour of love which took weeks. But us early adopters loved it.
Since then, Creative has been playing catchup to the likes of iRiver, Rio and Apple. Its players have always felt as cheap as they were, and despite a huge product catalogue, only the Zen Micro seemed worth a look. But now, after six years of waiting, the Zen Vision:M has arrived and, after only a glance we just knew that at last Apple was going to get a run for its money.
And, for the industry's sake, it's about time too. When the third generation iPod appeared and became one of the world's most phenomenal brands ever, we were at great pains to tell anyone who'd listen that it actually wasn't very good. There were loads of better choices to be made. iRiver, Rio, Cowon and others had Apple licked in terms of performance and features.
But then the iPod Mini appeared, followed quickly by the fourth gen iPod which combined many of the Mini's enhancements with third gen glitch-fixes to make a very good audio player indeed. Since that time everybody else has been playing catchup. By the time the likes of the iPod Photo and iPod Shuffle appeared Apple had annihilated the market place, offering design, performance and features at prices which left rivals downright uncompetitive. Remember Creative 'laughing' at the iPod Shuffle and its lack of screen, before realising that the new solid-state iPods were flying off the shelves and that Creative's solid-state drives had to have their prices slashed in response? The subsequent launches of the iPod Nano and the newer Video just seemed like final nails in coffins.
But to me the most troubling aspect of all this was iTunes. Everybody may want an iPod but few people know how one works. People see songs for 'sale' in iTunes and naturally think that they are 'buying' them, when, as we know, they're arguably only 'renting' them.
It's interesting to see what's going to happen in coming years. People who bought into Apple will be buying the new players from Creative (and Sony) and find that 'their' music that they 'bought' won't work. Great big Class Action lawsuit anyone? That'll teach them for forcing folk to download Quicktime player with downloading iTunes in some should-be-illegal 34.7MB download file. Of course, what is more likely is that we'll witness the launch of the aggressively-priced, revolutionary 7th gen 'iPod Hologram Camera Gaming Console' instead.
Back from the dead
When ATI's CrossFire system first worked in our offices it looked very much like something that was dead on arrival. Its release also coincided with a time when the company was massively restructuring and its major competitor was storming the market with its 7800 chip. It looked like ATI had lost the plot, and even when the X1800 was launched availability was limited. Well, the good news is that ATI is back. The company is adamant that it's got its house in order and from now on when products are launched they will be immediately available. It looks to be the case with the X1900 cards and CrossFire master cards will be available imminently.
However, high-end AGP cards certainly won't be around for the foreseeable future - unless NVIDIA's launch of the AGP-based 7800 GS proves a massive success. We'll be bringing you the results from that test, and from the new, fully-operational CrossFire cards, next month.
*Yes I know - actually the Hango/Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox PJB-100 was the first iPod-like hard disk-based MP3 player, but Creative's was the first globally popular one.