Seagrand CardRec RM-300M - credit-card sized portable audio player - Brief Article - Product/Service Evaluation

Japan, Inc., March, 2003

Now the market for portable audio players is getting kind of fat with so many different machines out there and not much to differentiate between them. Success, Seagrand reckons, comes from doing things a little differently in order to make a mark, so cue the snappily named "CardRec RM-300M," which strikes out for fame and glory by being not just portable, but really, really portable. A credit-card sized portable audio player, the RM-300M is the latest in the RAVEMETAL series of players from the company, whose previous models in the line included one that looks just like a tape cassette but can, cunningly, be connected to a PC, have your MP3 files downloaded to it, then be slotted straight into your car's tape player for instant aural delight, thereby removing the need to upgrade the stereo in your car. That's genius, but then so is the slim 300M, because, with dimensions of 77x54x9.8 mm, this little baby will slip right into your pocketbook. How's that for convenience? The player's MP3 encoder is based on the one found in that tape-cassette-shaped forerunner, the RAVEMETAL RM200M, and will handle MP3, WMA and ADP audio files.

The new credit-card player is available in three capacities: 128, 192 and 256 MB flash-RAM-wise and is compatible with all flavors of Windows on your PC. It has a line out socket so you can hook it up to an external device (like a compatible CD player or hi-fi) and USB 1.1 for the computer. And there's even a backlit LCD display on the thing--usually the first feature to go as stuff like this is miniaturized. Open price, but from approximately [yen] 23,000.

More info: www.seagrand.co.jp

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