DataPlay Reveals Its Hand In Vegas
By Doug Olenick -- TWICE, 1/22/2001
LAS VEGAS -DataPlay and its licensees finally took the covers off the plethora of DataPlay disc-based products that are expected to ship later this year with the official unveiling of the technology at CES.
Portable digital audio players, computer peripherals and PDAs from companies such as Creative Labs, Samsung, S3 and Toshiba, many of which have invested in DataPlay, took center stage at the DataPlay pavilion, along with branded DataPlay devices.
Most of the companies have firm plans to start shipping products this fall. All of the companies will tie their launches to DataPlay's schedule. A company spokeswoman said DataPlay could be ready to start shipping discs as early as September, but this could be pushed back a couple of months.
Chris Cudina, Samsung's senior business development manager, said his company is developing a music device and PC peripheral, along with a mini-system containing a docking port for a DataPlay-based portable music player. The PC peripherals are a USB PC drive and a PCMCIA card for laptops.
Samsung is very confident that this new technology, which allows 500MB of data to be written to a quarter-size optical disc, will be a hit with consumers.
"This will have a long life in this industry," Cudina said, pointing to the fact that it works with music, data and video, and that DataPlay has garnered support from the music industry, as well as the CE industry.
A Toshiba representative said the company has firm plans to roll out a music player this fall, and Imation is set to produce DataPlay discs.
Creative Labs displayed an MP3-type device, as did S3. CMC Magnetics had a slew of products, including a PDA and three music players.
DataPlay has ambitious plans to bring music players, digital cameras and PDAs to market, and it showed mock-ups of tablet-type portable computers.
