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Technology: View from the top
High-speed Net access that's out of this world
John Koehler retired from a career at Hughes Electronics and the CIA to build fast Net connections on satellites already in orbit.
By Mark Compton
[12/13/99]

21st Challenge
The perfect e-gift
What should you order online for Bill Clinton or Bill Gates, George W. Bush or Jesse Ventura?
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[12/11/99]

Dear Diary
Andrew Smales' astonishing Diaryland site provides the format. You supply the secrets.
By Todd Levin
[12/10/99]

Dot-com dogs
With Net-stock fever showing no signs of cooling, mediocre IPOs are growing as plentiful as fleas on a stray hound.
By Mark Gimein
[12/09/99]

Your boss may be monitoring your e-mail
Personal computers were supposed to liberate the workplace. So why do so many companies use them to spy on workers?
By Maura Kelly
[12/08/99]

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This year, the Rio is just one of a flood of MP3 hardware products that have hit the market in the wake of the big MP3 hype. There are suddenly dozens of nearly identical MP3 devices on the market. I got my hands on as many as I could, looking for those that offer more features than a basic MP3 player. Many were limited in scope, but as a group the second generation of MP3 products is promising.

There are still many fundamental flaws with MP3 music -- one is the simple fact that high-quality music is a memory hog, making it difficult to store large amounts of music on a small portable device. Secondly, most MP3 music is stuck in the computer; whereas consumers want to listen to music wherever they want, whenever they want it. In the perfect digital future, thanks to a seamless integration of smart software, wireless interfaces and portable players, I should be able to listen to MP3s and Internet radio in my car, over my home stereo or while out jogging. Think of it: an infinite amount of digital music available online, streaming wirelessly to wherever you happen to be, on command.

Some of the players I looked at are experimenting with ways to get the music out of your tinny computer speakers and into your stereo or car radio; others are looking at ways to cram up to 80 hours of MP3 music into one little device. I tussled with my PC for two weeks and tested five new MP3 hardware products, to see just how close we are to a pervasive digital music future. The reality still looks a lot like a tangle of wires and glitchy USB connections, but if you squint real hard, you might be able to see the future too.

The standard

To start off, I took a look at the latest in portable MP3 players: the diminuitive RioPort Rio 500 ($269), an updated version of the original MP3 player. RioPort, which spun off of Diamond Multimedia earlier this year in order to focus exclusively on MP3 products, has given the Rio 500 a better interface, improved design and construction and, most significantly, 32 MB more memory so that you can store more music. With a new USB port, it's also much easier to use -- just plug the player into the USB port, install the RioPort MP3 organizational software and you're done.

Even the software has been improved to be more intuitive -- it took only three clicks and 20 minutes to "rip" (or encode) a CD into MP3, and a comparable amount of effort to upload that into the player itself. Unfortunately, the Rio 500's main flaw still pervades: because it uses Flash Memory, it can store only 64 MB of music (roughly an hour). If you want to carry more than one album with you at a time, you'll have to invest in more Flash Memory cards; at $60 a pop, this is not a cheap endeavor. Otherwise, plan to troop back to your computer every hour.

Next page | A new kind of car radio