REB 1100 was to have the ability to play MP3's!

[nrapallo]

Sorry to digress a bit, but if they would have got this right, the EBW 1150 may have had sound support.

This was posted on the Yahoo ebook-community group in 2001:

>Another piece of idiocy: there is a musical note symbol on it now, so,
>curious, I pressed it, and a little message comes up saying something to
>the effect that "sometime in the future this button may do something."
>Right.

The 1100 has the ability to play MP3's with it. There's a lot of
debate over how to support this properly without rankling the
publishers. At release time the MP3 code was still pretty buggy, so
they choose to turn it off rather than risk the damage it might
cause. Having had a chance to play with a working MP3 1100, I gotta
say it's pretty darn cool. But sadly, this is one of those things
that folks are so paranoid about enabling. This is a clear example
of something I think Gemstar is doing wrong, but I can't do much
about. I think that if we turned on the MP3 code and let folks just
put whatever MP3's on their SmartMedia card they wanted, then we'd
have trouble keeping 1100's on the shelves. It combines my two
favorite gadgets for travel, sitting on an airplane with my MP3/eBook
player.

>
>And only 8 meg of memory in a $300 device when
>RAM is as dirt cheap as it is now?

The 8 meg of memory refers to the onboard flash storage, NOT the RAM.
And Flash memory is not as cheap as RAM. For the record, the 1100
uses EDO RAM, not the newer SDRAM, so the parts are more expensive
(this was the only choice at the time the unit was designed, DESPITE
knowing that EDO was going to go up in price).

Erik Walter <ebook@...>
Sat Jun 23, 2001 9:31 pm

and a follow-up:

Sorry for the misinformation on this one. It turns out that the MP3
code is still pretty brittle and that's MORE of the reason for the
missing MP3 functionality than any publisher interaction.

I frequently forget there is a difference between a "demoable"
feature and a "shippable" one. Just because an engineer can "demo"
MP3's playing, doesn't mean it's stable enough to "ship".

Sorry about that.

Erik Walter <ebook@...>
Sun Jun 24, 2001 1:22 am

By the way, a bio on who Erik Walter was, is available here.

p.s. check out this at the same website and you will find the ETI founders!

[DaleDe]

Well the little music symbol does something useful on the EB1150. It is the only programmable button available on the device. I have mine set to jump to the TOC which goes to the first page if there is no toc present. I find it more useful than an MP3 player since I already have an iPOD nano.

Dale

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Well the little music symbol does something useful on the EB1150. It is the only programmable button available on the device. I have mine set to jump to the TOC which goes to the first page if there is no toc present. I find it more useful than an MP3 player since I already have an iPOD nano.

Dale

My 'musical notes' button is set to 'change view' and sometimes to 'last book'. For the TOC, I usually just tap beside the '1' on the bottom scroll bar.

By the way, for those that don't know, just hold the 'musical notes' icon just outside the LCD touchscreen and then select one of the 'commands' presented.

The REB 1100 does play 8-bit .wav files in a very specific format through the headphone jack. But, alas, these .wav files can get quite large for even one minute of recording. Not very practical for MP3's!