CES 2005 - The Last Word

  Leave a comment      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

Tao was located in a bizarre but cute orb shaped tent in one of the car parks adjoining the Las Vegas Convention Centre. To be perfectly honest, this was much preferable to a stand in one of the halls, due mainly to the fact that there weren’t hundreds of people walking through that had no business being there – it’s a sore point of mine that most “trade” shows are populated by a massive amount of people that have nothing whatsoever to do with the trade in question. Their sole purpose seems to be trawling around the show with a big bag on wheels hoovering up anything and everything that might be given away free!

But I digress, back to Tao. I’m very glad that Tao invited me along to its tent, otherwise I would have never known it was there and would have consequently missed some very cool kit.

Of all the products that Tao had on show, my favourite was the WiFi MP3 player. This device may sound self explanatory, but the more I played with it, the more functionality I realised that it had. The basic spec is a 20GB, hard disk based digital music player that supports both MP3 and WMA. However, as its name suggests, there’s an integrated WiFi adapter that makes it more versatile than most of the other players on the market.

For a start, you don’t need to connect the player to your PC with a USB or FireWire cable to download your music. Instead you can connect via WiFi and send all your music across without the need for cables. But that’s just the beginning. You can also download content directly from the Internet, via subscription services such as MusicMatch. Tao is in talks with several music download providers and hopes to be able to offer the ability to use more than one service.

With the WiFi functionality you can use pretty much any wireless hotspot to augment your music library, saving you the hassle of waiting until you get home to download that new track you just heard. And hearing those new tracks is made all the easier by the ability to stream Internet radio stations to the WiFi MP3 player as well. You can listen to radio stations from all over the world via the Tao player and a WiFi connection. You can even record the content from the radio stations to the hard disk. Of course if you can’t find a hotspot and want to listen to some new music, you can just switch to the built-in FM tuner and give some of your local radio stations a try.

But the Tao WiFi MP3 player has one more very cool trick up its sleeve – an integrated FM transmitter. This technology was first seen in the iTrip accessory for the iPod, and lets the user listen to the contents of their player over any FM radio. The beauty of Tao’s solution is that you don’t need any accessories to achieve this, and you can quite happily listen to your MP3 collection in your car, without the need for wires. Of course this technology is theoretically illegal in the UK, but it hasn’t stopped retailers selling iTrips and consumers buying them.

Tao has no immediate plans to sell the WiFi MP3 player in Europe, but I hope that this situation will change in the near future. In a market where MP3 players have become almost passé, it’s great to see a company do something different with the technology. The WiFi MP3 player will carry a suggested retail price of $349.99 when it launches in the US in a few months.

Add your comment