User:Synthfiend/sandbox/Portable audio player history

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Early years
The immediate predecessor in the market place of the digital audio player was the portable CD player and prior to that, the personal stereo. In particular, Sony's Walkman and Discman are the ancestors of digital audio players such as Apple's iPod.

British scientist Kane Kramer invented the first digital audio player, the IXI, in 1979. The size of a credit card, the portable audio player featured a small LCD screen, navigation and volume buttons, and up to one hour of audio playback. Kramer filed for UK patent in 1981; UK patent 2115996 was issued in 1985, and was issued in 1987. A pre-production prototype was unveiled at the APRS Audio/Visual trade exhibition in October 1986, but following a 1988 boardroom dispute and failure to raise the £60,000 required to renew the patent resulted in the patent entering the public domain. While Kramer still owns the designs, the prototypes did not enter commercial production.

1990s
In 1996 AT&T developed the FlashPAC digital audio player which initially used AT&T Perceptual Audio Coding (PAC) for music compression, but in 1997 switched to AAC. At about the same time AT&T also developed an internal Web based music streaming service that had the ability to download music to FlashPAC. AAC and such music downloading services later formed the foundation for the Apple iPod and iTunes.

The first production-volume portable digital audio player was's The Audible Player (also known as MobilePlayer, or Digital Words To Go). Available for sale in January 1998 for US$200, it was designed specifically for manufacturer Audible.com's spoken word recordings, and only supported playback of digital audio in Audible's proprietary, low-bitrate format. The Audible Player had rudimentary controls and no display, and capacity was limited to 4 MB of internal flash memory, or about 2 hours of play, using a custom rechargeable battery pack.

In 1997, Saehan Information Systems introduced the first portable MP3 player, marketed and sold in Asia as MPMan. The flash-based player was available with storage capacity of either 32 MB or 64 MB (6 or 12 songs) and had a LCD to display information about the song currently playing. In mid-1998, Saehan licensed the players to Eiger Labs for North American distribution, who rebranded them as the EigerMan F10 and F20. In September of the same year, Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio PMP300. Holiday sales of the Rio PMP300 exceeded expectations, spurring interest and investment in the digital music industry. Because of its notoriety as the target of a major lawsuit, the Rio has been erroneously assumed to be the first digital audio player.

In 1998, Compaq introduced the first hard drive based DAP using a 2.5" laptop drive, licensed to HanGo Electronics and sold as the PJB-100 Personal Jukebox. The player had an initial capacity of 4.8 GB, with an advertised capacity of 1200 songs. In 2000, Creative also called their new player a 'jukebox' when they released the 6GB hard drive based Creative NOMAD Jukebox. Later players in the Creative NOMAD range used microdrives rather than laptop drives. Archos answered Creative's offering with the Jukebox 6000.

2000s


On 23 October 2001, Apple Computer unveiled the first generation iPod, a 5 GB hard drive based DAP with a 1.8" Toshiba hard drive and a 2" monochrome display. With the development of a spartan user interface and a smaller form factor, the iPod was initially popular within the Macintosh community. In July 2002, Apple introduced the second generation update to the iPod. It was compatible with Windows computers through Musicmatch Jukebox. In 2007, Apple introduced the iPod Touch, the first iPod with a multi-touch screen. Its media player was split into the Music and Videos apps.

In 2002, Archos released the first "portable media player" (PMP), the Archos Jukebox Multimedia with a little 1.5" colour screen. Manufacturers have since implemented abilities to view images and play videos into their devices. The next year, Archos released another multimedia jukebox, the AV300, with a 3.8" screen and a 20GB hard drive.

In 2004, Microsoft attempted to take advantage of the growing PMP market by launching the Portable Media Center (PMC) platform. It was introduced at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show with the announcement of the Zen Portable Media Center, which was co-developed by Creative. The Microsoft Zune series would later be based on the Gigabeat S, one of the PMC-implemented players.

In May 2005, flash memory maker SanDisk entered the PMP market with the Sansa line of players, starting with the e100 series, and then following up with the m200 series, and c100 series.

Apple Inc. hired Kramer as a consultant and presented his work as an example of prior art in the field of digital audio players during their litigation with Burst.com almost two decades later. In 2008 Apple acknowledged Kramer as the Inventor of the Digital audio player

Samsung SPH-M2100, the first mobile phone with built-in MP3 player was produced in South Korea in August 1999. Samsung SPH-M100 (UpRoar) launched in 2000 was the first cell phone to have MP3 music capabilities in the US market. The innovation spread rapidly across the globe and by 2005, more than half of all music sold in South Korea was sold directly to mobile phones and all major handset makers in the world had released MP3 playing phones. By 2006, more MP3 playing mobile phones were sold than all stand-alone MP3 players put together. The rapid rise of the media player in phones was quoted by Apple as a primary reason for developing the iPhone. In 2007, the installed base of phones that could play media was over 1 billion.