engadget.com — At 18.3 grams, the Stone is slightly heavier than the 2G shuffle -- it seems Creative was more concerned with keeping prices low than weight down, as the 1GB, clip-equipped player will retail for just $40 when it hits shelves on the 14th.
May 3, 2007 View in Crawl 4
balancedMay 3, 2007
zweben: Well, the Zune apparently applies DRM to shared songs. Also, a few of the Sony Digital Music (Not, not technically MP3) players transcoded to a Sony-proprietary format so were close to DRM at least.
mjesalesMay 3, 2007
at $40 you really can't go wrong... even if you lose it or the dog eats it...
ffejreyMay 3, 2007
The one downside to the iPod is iTunes, I'm getting this little guy. No AAC? All of my songs are mp3 anyway...
maarekMay 3, 2007
I think they are getting Dugg down because anytime anyone releases anything that relates to music playing whatsoever there is an immediate influx of Ipod owners and fans who come in and call out copycat. In this case I think they probably have a point (although Creative released their displayless [is that a word?] MuVo long before Apple had probably even considered flash based players....much like the HDD based players as well...so one could claim the shuffle was the original copycat but meh) but still people do feel like they gotta remind Ipod users that Apple's s**t does indeed stink and in all honesty usually every bit as bad (if not worse) than most other options. Still... the stone does support DRM to the same extent as the Ipod...although it does not lock the user into a single DRM supplier.
seph7May 3, 2007
I wish creative would get some designers instead of just copying apple. I mean the design is so obviously a copy of the iPod shuffle even the button layout is the same. Also no AAC support and it holds 500 songs (which would have to be at 64kbps) torture for the ears or what!!
shark72May 3, 2007
"nice.. but they could have at least come up with their own button design"Why? U/D for volume and L/R for forward/back are pretty pervasive. People are familiar with this layout and it just works. Looks like functionality and ease of use were the goals here.
smillsMay 4, 2007
Yeah, everyone wants to be different, that's why the majority of hard drive based mp3 players aren't iPods...
tcardone05May 5, 2007
Creative FTW!