PCWorld reports that Iomega is now shipping an MP3 player that uses its Clik! disks which it’s apparently now renamed the PocketZip.
Whatever they call it, the darn thing is only 40 megabytes. At $300 for the player and $10 per disk, I can’t imagine there’s any market at all for this player. Sure the cost-per-megabyte is only 25 cents, but a) these disks have a horrible reputation as being flakey and prone to problem as it is, much less if you’re going to take them jogging and b) who wants to switch disks after every 40 megabytes of MP3s?
If it had two disk ports and the quality was much better, then it might be more interesting, but it’s this sort of 2-3 years behind the times thinking that has practically ruined Iomega.
Plus, this player also integrates some of the stupid new security measures, and the morons at PCWorld don’t even think about what they’re writing.
One of those measures allows PocketZip disks to be shared among different players but prevents you from copying music tracks from someone else’s PocketZip storage disk onto your computer’s hard drive.
Of course it also prevents me from copying my music onto my hard drive, if I happen to have more than one hard drive. Suppose you’ve got some songs on this player, and your HD gets fried, and you run to Best Buy and replace it. Don’t even think about copying that music onto the new hard drive — the player interprets that as a piracy attempt.