As per usual, I jumped to read Mark Jen’s latest entry as soon as my RSS reader picked it up. Unfortunately, this time I can’t seem to agree with him on his take of the issue. Here’s the main part, (he’s referring to the Archos PMA430 BTW) for those that don’t want to read the actual entry (although I highly encourage doing so):
I suppose the only thing is that I don’t understand why it’s ~$700. I mean, if you can add extra functionality for minimal cost, go ahead. But I definitely don’t justify a huge pricetag with the fact that it does 4 or 5 other things. And it’s only 30GB?! What’s with that?! I guess I’m just not entirely sold on the “all-in-one” convergence devices. I’d rather have multiple items that each do their respective function extremely well and have the smallest form factor possible - I don’t mind having 4 or 5 separate devices if they are each best in class products. Then, I can choose what functionality (and thus devices) I want to bring with me everyday.
If you can tell me where to snag a PSP ($279), an iPod ($299), and a PDA ($449) for $700, please, do inform us all…
For those who can’t count, that comes to $1027 all together, and it was a PSP from Amazon, a regular iPod direct from Apple (oh come on, the Shuffle isn’t an iPod… it’s a pack of gum that hums), and a PDA direct from HP.
In all honesty though, I would go with the laptop option as well (well, no would, I HAVE). Not only is that thing ugly and overpriced, but come on, you could do all that among countless other things on a laptop and not really have it cost you all that much more space (assuming you’re carting around all the devices it replaces at once).
Sorry Mark, but this time I had to shoot you down. Your logic was just flawed…
2 Comments so far
markjen, on April 14, 2005 at 10:08pm, said:
Ah, you are right, it does cost a bit more than $700 to buy all 3 items. I didn’t do my research on PDA prices before I posted; I had incorrectly estimated a PDA to be around $250, a PSP to be $250 and a iPod to be $300 which at $800 total would be in the ballpark of the Archos.
Looking around at PDAs though, it does seem that they are quite expensive… the HP hx4700 starts at $599! :O
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Chris Meller, on April 15, 2005 at 5:12am, said:
You’re tellin’ me they’re expensive… I’d like to replace my iPaq 4550 at some point, but I can’t afford $500-600 to replace something that technically works just fine for my purposes. Under the same logic, I can’t afford a new iPod since I was careless enough to let my baby die over a year ago…
BTW, thanks for the link! :)
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