Diamond Multimedia with its Rio PMP300 participant is commonly cited as the primary however the honor really goes to an obscure South Korean firm, SaeHan, which launched the MPMan solid-state participant in March 1998—greater than three years earlier than the iPod. Inside reminiscence was restricted to 32 or 64 MB—that’s proper megabytes. When you hitched the participant’s docking station to your laptop, the very best you would do was encode and switch perhaps 20 songs, in the event you had been fortunate.
Eiger Labs rebranded and imported the 32-MB participant to North America because the MPMan F10 and bought it for round $250. It weighed 2.2 ounces and was good and compact at 3.5 x 2.75 x 0.6 inches. The corporate additionally marketed the MPMan F20, which had a SmartMedia card enlargement slot and ran on a single AA battery, as a substitute of the F10’s rechargeable NiMH battery.
By comparability, the unique iPod boasted 32 MB of RAM plus 5 or 10 GB of storage, measured 4 x 2.4 x 0.8 inches, and weighed 6.5 ounces (many of the weight attributable to its whirring onerous drive).
For a stroll down iPod Reminiscence Lane, try “The Historical past of the iPod Traditional”.
