TOUCHSCREEN!

I

A touchscreen would be good for a video player with a large screen so that the player won’t be much larger than the screen. I am surprised that Sandisk hasn’t replaced the View with a player that has a 3 to 3.5 inch touchscreen and a full sized SDHC card slot.

Imo Sandisk should also make a model that is a between the size  of the Clip and Fuze but that runs on one AAA battery, has a card slot, no video, a basic small low power alphanumeric screen that is on all the time the player is on(LCD?), a clip on the back, and no USC connectivity.

@jk98 wrote:

no USC connectivity.

 

I don’t understand :neutral_face:

Tht was a typo. It should have been no USB connectivity.

@jk98 wrote:
Tht was a typo. It should have been no USB connectivity.

Oh. But how is that a good thing?

@d_headshot wrote:


@jk98 wrote:
Tht was a typo. It should have been no USB connectivity.


Oh. But how is that a good thing?

I believe it’s because he wants a player that strictly runs on batteries…but I could be wrong

"Oh. But how is that a good thing? "

Lower cost to produce. No circuitry to support USB, no connector for it, and no cable included in the package. It is also very comforting for those who are computer illiterate, computer phobic, or who don’t have regular access to a pc for a player to not even be able to be connected to a pc.

@jk98 wrote:

"Oh. But how is that a good thing? "

 

Lower cost to produce. No circuitry to support USB, no connector for it, and no cable included in the package. It is also very comforting for those who are computer illiterate, computer phobic, or who don’t have regular access to a pc for a player to not even be able to be connected to a pc.

While all these ‘minuses’ certainly would reduce the cost of the unit, it’s also a double-edged sword.

With no USB or other means to connect to a computer, there would be no way to fix any bugs, or add any enhancements via firmware updates. If something wasn’t quite right in the initial programming, the user has to learn to ‘live with it’ and the company who produced it has no way to make it right. Sort of a do-or-die proposition. They either do it right the 1st time, or word gets around about the flaw and the product dies on the vine.

This is the way it is with the SlotMusic player. A little better navigation capabilities (even with no screen) would have been nice, and maybe a few more people would buy it. But that’s all water under the bridge now, as there is no way to add these features since it has no USB port.

At only 20 bucks, it’s not that big a deal; but when you start going up to 30, 40, $50 or more, that’s too much to risk both for the consumer and the company to ‘eat it’ if it fails. So adding a USB port is like insurance for the company. They (and users) can fix problems if they arise.

Message Edited by Tapeworm on 01-13-2009 09:24 AM

“With no USB or other means to connect to a computer, there would be no way to fix any bugs, or add any enhancements via firmware updates”

Huh? A firmware update could be put on a card and put into the player that way(if it has been designed for that).

@jk98 wrote:

Huh? A firmware update could be put on a card and put into the player that way(if it has been designed for that).

I seriously doubt this is possible. The players ‘reads only’ from the card. You cannot transfer programming information from the card to the player.

Were this possible, the Fuze and the ‘E’ series v2 models would already be ‘Rockboxable’. One could simply copy the Rockbox files onto the card, insert it and the player would intitate the different firmware and load the Rockbox program whenever the card was in place. Obviously, this is not the case. It would be pretty sweet if it were.

It’s not like a ‘bootable’ CD for example, where the computer recognizes the ‘instructions’ on the CD and boots according to that rather than it’s normal programming routine. These little guys are way too simple and un-complicated to do anything like that.

“I seriously doubt this is possible. The players ‘reads only’ from the card. You cannot transfer programming information from the card to the player.”

Years ago I had a Sonic Blue mp3 CD player. I upgraded the firmware on it by burning the firmware file to a CDR, then playing that CDR in the player. I see no reason why a flash memory card based player can’t be designed to install new firmware that is on a flash memory card. Think of how the Fuze for example upgrades its firmware. It just looks for a firmware file in the root directory. There is no reason that a flash card based player can’t look for a firmware file on the root of card inserted in the player. I don’t see much difference between the two.