Another one supporting AA/AAA powered players as I totally agree with the opinions voiced by JK98 and many here.
I myself don’t really care whether it’s AA/AAA or some other type of battery, just STANDARDIZE the **bleep** things and make them easily replaceable. The AA standard is just easier to deal with as it’s been around forever.
One cannot get a decent AA player these days and the reasons have been discussed in this thread and others.
(see:
http://www.misticriver.net/forums/iriver-t10-t30-series-flash-players/58133-t10-forum-dead.html)
Here’s my thoughts of the factors:
- Consumers.
Sadly, the ones that want to see more DAPs with replaceable batteries are a very small minority.
A lot of people want a device that can do ‘everything’: music, videos, internet browsing, games, phone calls… they don’t want to lug around a separate device for each category and they want it to be flashy with a lot of colors, touch screen etc.
The problem is threefold.
One is that, so far, trying to cram everything into one device leads to meidocrity in most and that is what we see in today’s players which have lousier playback than, say, the DAPs of 2004-2006. The second is that all this eye candy is very battery demanding thus the need for internal Li-ion with higher capacity voltage.
The 3rd is size - smaller size means a specially designed battery and again the big and clumsy AA is discarded.
- Consumerism: there is no demand for replaceable batteries because people simply don’t care - in a year of two they’ll be buying the latest and not-so-greatest and throw the old one into the garbage without a second thought.
People just have no appreciation for the things they own.
This won’t stop until humanity will find a way to recycle all these or until we all be neck-deep in a pile of waste.
The companies themselves don’t care - they just want to sell more devices, so why offer a replacement battery with zero profit when you sell them the next model?
- Apple.
Leading the world of consumer electronics, if not in terms of sales at least in tems of influence, Apple was always about locking down it’s buyer, whether with a built-in non-user replaceable battery (even in their notebooks!) or with a supplied software (iTunes) and now when they’ve taken the lead with the iPhone/iPod touch and made their touchscreen the defacto standard every company is going down their footsteps, trying to imitate them (a bad decision in the long run IMHO) producing similar devices (the Cowon S9 comes to mind). So what we now get is an endless march of touch screen quasi-PMP devices that do eveything but the intended use of the whole **bleep** category - to output good audio.
I can’t see any company coming out with a new AA powered player and I can (sort of) understand why - it would be a business suicide.
This sad state of affairs is the reason I think that my first and only DAP, the iriver T10, will also be the last.
Message Edited by ssdd1 on 09-20-2009 05:23 AM
