9. MP3 And Personal Media Players, Continued

High costs and lack of convenience meant removable storage was never popular in MP3 players. I2Go introduced a player based on IBM's MicroDrive; you could plug two 1 GB MicroDrives into an MP3 player no larger than a flash player, but you needed $2,000 in spare change to do it. I2Go folded after handing out free samples to all nominees of the 2000 Academy Awards. Iomega tried a similar approach with the HipZip, which used the far cheaper 40 MB Click drives (rebranded as PocketZip) costing about $10 each; the HipZip played WMA and AAC tracks as well as MP3. The problem was that although it was technically possible to make a 60 or 80 MB drive, Iomega chose 40 MB so people would buy multiple disks - you couldn't get a 60 minute CD on a 40 MB disc without dropping the quality dramatically.

Sony brought out its first digital music player in 2000, but it wasn't called a Walkman and it didn't play MP3s: the MC-P10 Music Clip transcoded your MP3s to the ATRAC3 format used by MiniDisc players (and every Sony music device up until the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone). The Memory Stick Walkman had the name and Memory Stick expansion but still only played ATRAC files. Nike introduced the first exercise player in 2001, the Nike PSA Play, a lightweight flash player with large buttons, an armband and a neoprene case. That same year, Intel brought out the first 128 MB MP3 player, but the Pocket Concert wasn't on sale for long, and in October 2001, Apple announced the first 5 GB iPod.

Since then, the market has become segmented into extremely small players that double as USB flash drives with up to 2 GB of storage, hard drive players with anything between 10 GB and 100 GB, and small flash players with 4 GB to 16 GB of space. Nearly all PDAs and an increasing number of mobile phones can play MP3s.

The earliest in-car MP3 system was the Empeg Car in 1999 (renamed the Rio Car when SonicBLUE bought it). Traditional car accessory suppliers like Alpine have also offered hard drive MP3 players with dashboard controls, in-car CD drives that play data CDs of MP3s, and iPod integration. In 2005, Mercedes Benz was the first car manufacturer to offer an official iPod integration kit. In 2006, Fiat used Microsoft's Windows Automotive for the Blue&Me mobile phone and MP3 voice control system. Starting in the middle of 2007 United, Continental, Delta and Emirates plan to offer iPod connections in individual seats for charging and streaming music from the aircraft entertainment systems.

2004 Samsung's Portable Media Center used Microsoft's portable media OS, based on Windows CE.