(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High-Tech News Site in Japanese)
•Hagiwara Sys-Com Introduces MP3 Player with SmartMedia
October 1, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Hagiwara Sys-Com Co., Ltd. is exhibiting a prototype portable CD player using MPEG Audio Layer3 (MP3) at World PC Expo 98. The show runs through Friday at the Japan Convention Center (Makuhari Messe) in Chiba prefecture in Japan.
MP3 has recently been attracting attention among music lovers. MP3 is a compact format for sound data requiring about a tenth the file size of WAV-formatted data. In addition, sound quality almost parallels that of CDs.
Korea's Saehan Information Systems Inc. also sells a similar product, called mpman. The mpman has 64MB of flash memory, and a replaceable flash memory card.
Diamond Multimedia Systems Japan is also planning to introduce a similar product, the Rio PMP300, in December.
Hagiwara Sys-Com's new product differs from the others in its adoptation of SmartMedia as its storage medium. SmartMedia has been widely used as a storage medium for digital cameras.