iRiver Slates Shipping Of DataPlay-Based Device
By Doug Olenick -- TWICE, 3/18/2002
NEW YORK— Digital handheld music player vendor iRiver announced last week that it will ship a device based on DataPlay media this summer.
The iDP-100, suggested retail price $369, will read and write to 500MB DataPlay discs and will feature a small LCD, 8MB of SDRAM and have basic personal information management capability. The player/recorder will connect to a PC via a USB dock and use Future Player software to burn music. An exact ship date was not released.
The iDP-100 is expected to be the second DataPlay device on the market following the scheduled May 1 release of a model by Evolution Technologies. Evolution was tapped as the first vendor allowed to start shipping a DataPlay device late last year and introduced its product in January.
The company originally planned to start retail shipments this month, but a company spokesman said limited availability forced the company to push this back to May 1. If Evolution had started shipping on schedule it only would have been able to meet about one-third of its orders, so the company decided it would be better to wait until it could fulfill all its orders before it started shipping.
The original estimated street price for the Evolution product has shifted up to the $359 to $369 range, a $40 increase from what was anticipated in January. Blank media is expected to cost between $5 and $8 per disc, the company spokesman said.
No announcements have been forthcoming from Samsung and Toshiba, both of which had taken a financial stake in DataPlay and expressed an interest in rolling out product.
